---
title: 'Director of Hardware Engineering at Glacier'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/director-of-hardware-engineering-glacier-san-francisco-0c0a3v5qhm86'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-04'
---

# Director of Hardware Engineering at Glacier

- **Company:** Glacier
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-10-01
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-04
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/glacier/c944e1ae-7c7d-4429-996c-6c71f2db0d79

## Job description

This role is in-office in San Francisco Dogpatch neighborhood.

## About Glacier

Hey, we're Glacier! Series A startup based in San Francisco tackling one of the world's most pressing problems: trash. Did you know that in the US, we send over half of our recyclables to the landfill? We're working to fix that. In doing so, we'll also be reducing carbon emissions, energy consumption, and depletion of natural resources. Glacier builds custom sorting robots designed to sort apart recyclables as well as AI-powered business analytics that enable recyclers to superpower their plants and improve our society's circularity.[From major CPG companies like Colgate and Amazon](https://www.packworld.com/sustainable-packaging/recycling/article/22953724/colgatepalmolive-amazon-glacier) to municipal recycling facilities, our clients trust us to turn recycling data into actionable insights. Our technology has been recognized as one of[TIME's Best Inventions](https://time.com/collections/best-inventions-2025/7318523/glacier-recycling-robots/) and[featured in a TIME documentary](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQ8nEagtVZI), TechCrunch, Fortune, and CBS.

## The Role

We're looking for an experienced Director of Hardware Engineering to lead Glacier's hardware and robotics development. You'll own the hardware roadmap and execution, lead our mechanical and electrical engineering teams, and ensure our systems are reliable, scalable, manufacturable, and cost-effective. This role reports directly to our Co-Founder and CTO and will play a key role in shaping both our hardware architecture and how the team operates as we scale.

## What you'll do

- Own the strategy and execution of Glacier's hardware and robotics roadmap in close partnership with Product Management
- Lead, mentor, and develop our hardware engineering team, keeping engineers focused and unblocked
- Drive technical decisions and architectural tradeoffs across complex hardware systems
- Establish lightweight engineering processes that improve execution, quality, and reliability
- Partner with Operations, Manufacturing, Field Service, and Software to resolve cross-functional issues
- Ensure machines can be manufactured, deployed and supported reliably at scale
- Balance engineering capacity, customer timelines, deployment requirements, cost, and risk
- Step in as an IC when needed to unblock critical technical challenges

This is a technical leadership role, not a day-to-day design role. You won't be expected to own CAD or execute routine hardware design work, but you should be comfortable getting deep into technical problems, reviewing designs, and providing architectural guidance.

## What we're looking for

- 5+ years of hardware engineering experience, including 2+ years leading engineering teams
- Strong technical background in robotics, mechatronics, pneumatics, structural design, and DFM
- Experience taking hardware from prototype through production, including contract manufacturing and supply chain
- Experience building hardware for real-world deployment
- Strong project judgment across engineering capacity, customer timelines, cost, risk, and deployment constraints

What will make you successful

- Technical judgment: You can get deep into complex hardware problems while keeping sight of what needs to ship
- Prioritization: You make clear tradeoffs across effort, risk, cost, lead times, and customer impact
- Leadership: You set direction, unblock engineers, and hold the team accountable
- Systems thinking: You understand how hardware decisions affect manufacturing, field service, operations, and software
- Adaptability: You thrive in an early-stage environment and are willing to jump in when needed

Bonus points

- Experience at an early-stage startup (<50 employees)
- Industrial automation, robotics, or heavy machinery experience
- Hardware deployed across multiple customer sites
- Edge deployments or on-site hardware troubleshooting experience

## Compensation

The total cash compensation range for this role is $185,000 - $200,000. In addition to cash compensation, Glacier also offers competitive equity compensation and benefits. Final compensation will depend on job-related skills and knowledge, experience level, interview performance, and other relevant factors.

## About Glacier

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Glacier builds next-generation AI-powered robots that make recycling more efficient, profitable, and circular by recovering high-value materials from waste streams.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A; total funding $29M)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: Not publicly available (co-founders began working on the concept around 2022)
- **Founders**: Rebecca Hu-Thrams and Areeb Malik

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Climate Technology / Recycling Robotics / Waste Management
- **Target customers**: Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs) and consumer product brands (B2B)
- **Mission or purpose**: “End waste by ensuring nothing valuable ends up in a landfill.”

## Products & Services
- **Glacier Robot**: A compact, AI-guided robotic arm that straddles conveyor belts, using a vacuum cup to pick and sort specific recyclables (plastics, film, paper, metals). It is trained on billions of real recycling images and can recognize 30+ material types. The arm can be deployed in hard-to-staff zones and helps MRFs improve yield and safety. [endwaste.io](https://endwaste.io/)
- **AI Brand Intelligence**: A real-time, item-level dashboard that gives brands visibility into exactly what packaging materials are flowing through the recycling stream, enabling them to track recovery rates and improve packaging design. [endwaste.io](https://endwaste.io/)
- **Vision-only system**: Glacier’s AI vision technology can also be deployed without the physical robot, providing material characterization and monitoring for facilities that do not yet need a picker. [geekwire.com](https://www.geekwire.com/2025/recycling-gets-smarter-ai-robots-from-amazon-backed-startup-are-sorting-waste-in-seattle/)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Total Funding**: $29M (as of May 2025 Series A; previously raised $4.5M seed in 2022) – [geekwire.com](https://www.geekwire.com/2025/recycling-gets-smarter-ai-robots-from-amazon-backed-startup-are-sorting-waste-in-seattle/)
- **Key Metric**: Annual revenue of approximately $3.3M (LinkedIn estimate) [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/endwaste)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Ecosystem Integrity Fund (lead, Series A), Amazon Climate Pledge Fund, New Enterprise Associates (NEA); key partner: Recology (Seattle) [geekwire.com](https://www.geekwire.com/2025/recycling-gets-smarter-ai-robots-from-amazon-backed-startup-are-sorting-waste-in-seattle/)
- **Growth Signals**: 44.4% year-over-year headcount growth (43 employees); robots deployed in California, Michigan, Arizona, Illinois, and Washington; vision-only systems in Indiana, New Jersey, Minnesota, Texas; actively developing technology for biopolyester (plant-based) plastics in partnership with Amazon; Washington State passed recycling legislation (SB 5284) expected to drive further demand. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/endwaste) [geekwire.com](https://www.geekwire.com/2025/recycling-gets-smarter-ai-robots-from-amazon-backed-startup-are-sorting-waste-in-seattle/)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Proprietary AI**: Trained on billions of real-world recycling images to recognize a wide variety of materials with high accuracy (80-90% capture rate on target plastics).
- **Compact, rugged design**: Robots are smaller and built to retrofit existing conveyor lines without major facility changes.
- **Dual revenue model**: Sells both hardware/robots to MRFs and data/subscriptions (AI Brand Intelligence) to brands, creating sticky relationships on both sides.
- **Mission-driven credibility**: Strong brand alignment with circular economy goals; backed by Amazon and major climate investors.
- **Co-founder domain expertise**: Areeb Malik spent time working on the sorting line to understand real-world challenges; the company emphasizes human-machine collaboration, not replacement.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scale deployments**: Increasing robot installations across the U.S., especially in states with new extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws.
- **Innovate on new materials**: Developing sorting capabilities for plant-based biopolyesters used by Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods.
- **Deepen brand partnerships**: Expanding the AI Brand Intelligence platform to give consumer goods companies real-time circularity metrics.
- **International reach**: Already operating in 7 countries (U.S., Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Canada, Singapore) [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/endwaste)

## Why Work Here
- **Impactful mission**: Employees directly contribute to reducing landfill waste and improving recycling rates.
- **Fast-growing team**: 44% headcount growth in the past year, with openings across engineering, operations, field support, and sales. [endwaste.io](https://endwaste.io/about/) [jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/glacier)
- **Engineering culture**: Co-founders come from tech backgrounds (Malik was a senior software engineer at Facebook); employees work on cutting-edge AI, robotics, and computer vision.
- **Global and diverse team**: Workforce spans 7 countries with a mix of technical, operational, and sales roles.
- **Work location**: Headquarters in San Francisco; remote/hybrid policy not explicitly stated, but roles span multiple geographies. Most employees are in the U.S., with additional hubs in Latin America.

## Sources
1. [endwaste.io](https://endwaste.io/)
2. [endwaste.io/about/](https://endwaste.io/about/)
3. [linkedin.com/company/endwaste](https://www.linkedin.com/company/endwaste)
4. [geekwire.com](https://www.geekwire.com/2025/recycling-gets-smarter-ai-robots-from-amazon-backed-startup-are-sorting-waste-in-seattle/)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/glacier](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/glacier)

## Other roles at Glacier

- [Computer Vision DATA Engineer - Fully Remote USD - Latin America based](https://feeny.ai/job/computer-vision-data-engineer-fully-remote-usd-latin-america-based-glacier-ev3ztacy7msj) — Latin America
- [System Engineer, Fleet Support - Fully Remote USD - South America](https://feeny.ai/job/system-engineer-fleet-support-fully-remote-usd-south-america-glacier-latin-pgwww57zvn6f) — Latin America
- [Director of Computer Vision](https://feeny.ai/job/director-of-computer-vision-glacier-san-francisco-k817gw93fms7) — San Francisco, CA