--- title: 'Hardware Test Lead at Specter' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/hardware-test-lead-specter-san-francisco-m6ynp7p1kq82' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-21' --- # Hardware Test Lead at Specter - **Company:** Specter - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-08-05 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-21 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/specter/6c6e8d64-90b3-4533-a31c-495fe3798614 ## Job description Your job is to build the machine that hunts down our hardware's weaknesses and gets that data in front of the people who can fix them. You will guide what we test, how hard, what's automated, what stays in-house, what goes to a lab—and the culture that grows up around it. ## About Specter Specter’s mission is to help customers automate the physical world. Today, we build video sensors with state-of-the-art AI agents that answer any question, anywhere in their environments. Our systems can automatically detect and reason about any physical activity captured on camera, from security incidents (e.g. perimeter intrusion, theft, LPR), to safety monitoring (e.g. PPE detection, injured people), to operational efficiency (e.g. material tracking, congestion monitoring). We offer both long range wireless (1km range) and wired sensor variants to suit any deployment. ## The Role Establish the hardware test system, team, and culture. Define what good testing looks like here—what tests need running, when, and why; what evidence counts; where the bar sits; and how seriously we treat a failure. Derive reliability and abuse-test requirements from how our products actually get deployed and mistreated, and make sure every campaign's data lands back in design decisions. We're small, so you'll still get your hands dirty establishing the team, facilities, equipment, systems, and culture. Concretely, here are some of the things you'll work on in the first few months: - Own DVT and certification — Plan and run DVT campaigns covering environmental, mechanical, and electrical stress, EMC, abuse, HALT, and lifetime reliability. Run pre-compliance EMC in-house; drive FCC, CE (EN/CISPR), and UL submissions through external labs. - Systematize our qualification — Codify our qualification campaigns: how we decide what testing to run, pass/fail criteria, sample sizes, traceability, and how we document it. - Reliability and abuse testing — Work out what the field will do to our hardware, and decide how to stress it to establish margin beyond our ratings. - Close the loop — Establish RCA practice for field failures, and fold every lesson back into the test suite and the next design revision. - Automate — Anything we run 3x gets scripted. Push testing into fixtures and automation so every new product gains coverage faster. - Build vs. outsource — Choose what we test in-house versus send out. Manage lab relationships, and build the business case for capital equipment when owning the gear wins. - Build the team and the culture — Set the standard for how testing is done and how failures are treated, so it survives contact with growth. As we scale, hire and mentor test engineers into it—starting with the one we're hiring alongside you. This is an early-stage team—you'll define how hardware qualification works here and how it scales as the product line and production ramp. ## Skills and Experience - 5+ years of hardware test and qualification — In automotive, aerospace, defense, or industrial products. You've personally taken hardware through DVT and certification, end to end. - Test judgment — Deep knowledge of reliability, abuse, environmental, and electrical stress test methodology, and the instinct to set conditions from the product's actual deployment. - DVT ownership — You've written DVT plans from product requirements through execution and reporting, and held the exit bar. - Data fluency — You characterize margins statistically, spot trends across campaigns, and present findings that engineering and leadership can act on. - Hands-on — Environmental chambers, electronics test gear, EMC instrumentation, vibration equipment, and general bench tools are your natural habitat. - Enough Python and Linux — You can sequence automated tests using existing frameworks and instrument APIs, and you're at home in a Linux shell. - Vendors and budgets — You've managed external labs, negotiated test scope, and justified equipment spend to people who sign checks. - Clear writing — Your procedures, reports, and equipment justifications are auditable and actually get read. Bonus Skills - Formal certification experience — FCC, CE, or UL submissions you've driven end-to-end. - Extreme-environment products — Wide temperature range, UV, salt fog, IP-rated enclosures; solar/battery or low-power electronics. - Manufacturing test — Defining production test coverage and working with contract manufacturers on functional test. - Failure analysis techniques — Cross-sectioning, X-ray, SEM. - Built it before — You've stood up a test function or team from scratch at an early-stage hardware company. ## About Specter ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Specter builds and deploys long-range wireless sensing networks with AI-powered real-time alerts and semantic search, creating the perception layer for the physical world. - **Entity Type**: Private (funding stage not publicly disclosed) - **Headquarters**: Not publicly available (likely US based on website language and job postings) - **Founded**: Not publicly available - **Founders**: Not publicly available ## Core Business - Primary industries: Physical security, critical infrastructure monitoring, industrial IoT, real-time situational awareness - Target customers: Enterprise and government – including energy companies, data centers, construction firms, ports, stadiums, industrial facilities, and campuses - Mission statement: "Creating a Software Defined Physical World" – providing instant awareness through real-time alerts, semantic search, and a map-based view of every event ## Products & Services - **Specter Platform**: A SaaS-based physical intelligence platform that ingests data from long-range wireless sensors (video, thermal, acoustic) and applies general AI (natural language alerts) to detect events such as unauthorized access, safety hazards, equipment anomalies, fires, spills, and perimeter breaches. Features include semantic search, live and historical event detection, and complete situational awareness dashboards. - **Long-Range Wireless Sensing Network**: Proprietary hardware and software for rugged, wide-area coverage without trenching – deployed across refineries, deserts, offshore platforms, construction sites, and other harsh environments. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed - **Key Metric**: Annual revenue not publicly available; company is actively hiring (Software Engineer – Systems listing) and has a live product across multiple industry verticals. - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not publicly available - **Growth Signals**: Recent website updates as of June 2026; expanding to new use cases (energy, data centers, construction, ports, stadiums); job openings indicate scaling engineering team. ## Competitive Advantages - **Long-range wireless sensing** that eliminates blind spots without trenching or on-site personnel – a differentiator for remote and harsh environments. - **General AI with natural language alerts** – users set and query alerts in plain English, lowering the barrier for security and operations teams. - **Multimodal sensing** (video, thermal, acoustic) combined with real-time analytics for high-fidelity event detection (e.g., PPE compliance, spills, equipment theft, person-down incidents). - Focus on **critical infrastructure** where downtime or security gaps carry high stakes, creating deep vertical-specific moats. ## Strategic Focus - Expanding horizontal deployment across energy, data centers, construction, logistics, and campus security. - Deepening AI capabilities through real-time semantic search and event detection to replace traditional CCTV monitoring. - Building a “software-defined physical world” that unifies disparate sensors into a single intelligent layer. ## Why Work Here - Opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI + IoT systems that monitor real-world infrastructure at scale. - Engineering culture likely emphasizes distributed systems, computer vision, edge computing, and high-reliability software (based on job description for Software Engineer – Systems). - Fast-paced startup environment with a clear product-market fit across multiple verticals. - Remote/hybrid policy not explicitly stated; job posting does not specify location, but likely offers flexibility. ## Sources 1. [specter.co](https://specter.co/) 2. [specter.co/product](https://specter.co/product) 3. [specter.co/industries](https://specter.co/industries) 4. [specter.co/features](https://specter.co/features) 5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com - Software Engineer – Systems](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/specter/fe26a690-7934-46f4-bce2-8d8c5495a0dc) ## Other roles at Specter - [Wireless Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/wireless-software-engineer-specter-san-francisco-zvjchm89fzv0) — San Francisco, CA - [Software Engineer - Applied AI](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-applied-ai-specter-san-francisco-p7er9310dx06) — San Francisco, CA - [Senior Antenna Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-antenna-engineer-specter-san-francisco-xea2760wvrkw) — San Francisco, CA - [Software Engineer — Fleet](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-fleet-specter-san-francisco-5tm2vh5drfnf) — San Francisco, CA - [Platform Site Reliability Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/platform-site-reliability-engineer-specter-san-francisco-c9mhsvjd32qq) — San Francisco, CA - [Recruiting Coordinator](https://feeny.ai/job/recruiting-coordinator-specter-san-francisco-y4c4fq3ctm2y) — San Francisco, CA - [Founding Deployment Strategist](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-deployment-strategist-specter-san-francisco-81ba238x3y8m) — San Francisco, CA - [Senior Accounting Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-accounting-manager-specter-san-francisco-c560c7hymx09) — San Francisco, CA - [Hardware Test Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/hardware-test-engineer-specter-san-francisco-0tgzpmm9kqx3) — San Francisco, CA - [Founding Recruiter](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-recruiter-specter-san-francisco-rx0h3svbzxxs) — San Francisco, CA