---
title: 'Head of Hardware at Ultra'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-hardware-ultra-brooklyn-dtc2anggdp5p'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-19'
---

# Head of Hardware at Ultra

- **Company:** Ultra
- **Location:** Brooklyn, NY
- **Compensation:** $250k–$350k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-10-09
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-19
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/ultra/am9icG9zdDoZ7IILSsHIpv1vRJNV4CpT

## Job description

## The role

We are looking for someone to lead the team that designs and builds our high-performance warehouse robots. You will be taking complex electromechanical systems from a blank page through requirements, prototyping, lifecycle testing, and production, and shipping them by the thousands. Your mission is to build an elite team of engineers who know how to surprise and delight our customers with reliable, innovative hardware, and to build the engineering engine that lets us scale it. You’ll be given real budget, strategic influence, and a seat on the leadership team.

## What you’ll do

- Strategic ownership. You are a core member of the leadership team, with strategic influence over R&D priorities, product roadmap, capital allocation, and growth planning.
- Scale the current product to hundreds. Deliver hundreds of units on time and at the quality our customers expect, optimizing the design to raise field reliability and manufacturing yield.
- Lead next-gen design to deliver thousands. Own the end-to-end design process for our next-generation products. Invest in R&D that delivers significant improvements for our customers, and lead the team to build it at scale.
- Build a repeatable engine. Put in place the process, tooling, and documentation that let us go from concept to volume production predictably. Each iteration is a preparation for the next.
- Set engineering standards. As the tech lead, you will set expectations for quality, documentation, DFM/DFA, change control, and test coverage.
- Drive build vs. buy. Lead the decisions on what we design in-house vs. outsource, what we assemble ourselves vs. contract out, and where off-the-shelf parts are the right answer.
- Evaluate suppliers. Work with procurement to run a structured process to specify, evaluate, and select components and vendors.
- Build an elite hardware team. Hire a hardware team matched to the depth of design work ahead: mechanical, electrical, and manufacturing.
- Partner cross-functionally. Work closely with Software, Autonomy, Product, and Customer Operations to deliver a product that meets market needs.

## Who you are

- Shipped at volume. Track record leading teams that delivered complete systems from concept to customer, at thousands of units.
- 10+ years with similar hardware. Extensive experience developing robotics or comparable electromechanical systems and taking them from prototype to volume production.
- Technical and team leadership. You have both the technical depth and the leadership experience to make the right decisions, make the hard decisions, and deliver on time.
- Full lifecycle ownership. Hands-on experience running an engineering process from requirements → EVT/DVT/PVT builds → scaled production.
- Supplier expertise. Experience with supplier selection and management, including sourcing custom or hard-to-find components and evaluating vendor quality with a strict IQC process.
- Team builder. Proven ability to hire, develop, and retain strong engineers.c

## About Ultra

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Ultra builds practical, general-purpose industrial AI robots that automate repetitive warehouse tasks like packing, sorting, and kitting, with zero integration and rapid deployment.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage; $625K total funding)
- **Headquarters**: New York, NY, United States
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Jon Miller Schwartz (CEO), Max Friefeld (COO), Chetan Parthiban (Co-Founder & Chief Scientist), Oliver Ortlieb (Co-Founder & CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Robotics Engineering / Industrial Automation
- **Target customers**: B2B – warehouses, fulfillment centers, and logistics operators (enterprise and SMB)
- **Mission or purpose**: To deploy practical, general-purpose robots that generate immediate ROI by handling repetitive, high‑volume work, and to scale intelligence through real‑world data.

## Products & Services
- **[Operator](https://www.ultra.tech/)**: A stationary industrial AI robot designed for e‑commerce order packaging, sorting, and kitting. It operates up to 24 hours a day, requires no fixed infrastructure, installs in hours, and covers a 5×5 ft footprint with a 10 ft vertical reach. The robot learns new tasks from example data and improves fleet‑wide as more units are deployed.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of $625K (Seed: $125K in Aug 2024; Pre‑Seed: $500K in Sep 2024 led by Y Combinator)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Y Combinator (lead investor), three additional investors in Pre‑Seed round
- **Growth Signals**: 14 total employees (as of early 2025), 19 employees (latest) – **333% YoY headcount growth**; robots already deployed in real warehouses generating revenue and data; launched the Operator robot in April 2026 with 184 LinkedIn reactions; actively hiring across engineering, research, deployment, and people operations.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Zero‑integration deployment**: Robots can be rolled in, plugged in, and turned on within hours – no expensive infrastructure or lengthy integration.
- **Stationary, safe design**: No tipping risk, no battery swaps, no charging breaks – designed for continuous operation in real warehouse conditions.
- **AI trained with examples**: Uses neural nets trained on teleoperation data (≈2 hours) to learn new tasks, enabling rapid adaptation to variable items and changing workflows.
- **Fleet learning**: Every deployed robot feeds data back to improve the entire fleet – a data‑scale moat that compounds with more deployments.

## Strategic Focus
- Rapidly scale deployments across the US in 2025‑2026, building on proven field traction.
- Continue improving robot foundation models for faster, more robust task learning and execution.
- Expand from e‑commerce packaging into adjacent warehouse workflows (e.g., kitting, returns).
- Grow the team (targeting engineering, research, deployment, and people functions) to support production scaling.

## Why Work Here
- **Early‑stage impact**: Join a YC‑backed startup founded by three‑time entrepreneurs (previously founded Layer By Layer, Voodoo Manufacturing) with a decade of collaboration.
- **Fast‑paced, hands‑on culture**: Engineers and researchers directly own firmware, hardware, ML models, and deployment – from design to field support.
- **Real‑world robotics**: Work on robots that are already generating revenue in customer warehouses, not just lab prototypes.
- **Growth trajectory**: 333% headcount growth in the past year, with ambitious plans to scale from 19 to hundreds of employees.
- **Location & flexibility**: Based in New York City; roles span HQ (assembly, testing, R&D) and field deployment across the US.
- **Open roles** (as of early 2026): Robotics Firmware Engineer, Robotics Hardware Engineer, Data Operations Lead, Research Scientist, Product Engineer, Deployment Engineer, Head of People – offering broad ownership and career growth.

## Sources
1. [ultra.tech](https://www.ultra.tech/)
2. [Y Combinator – Ultra](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ultra)
3. [Built In – Ultra Company Profile](https://builtin.com/company/ultra-ultra-tech)
4. [Built In – Ultra Jobs](https://builtin.com/company/ultra-ultra-tech/jobs)
5. [LinkedIn – Ultra](https://www.linkedin.com/company/ultraroboticsco)

## Other roles at Ultra

- [Facilities & Office Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/facilities-office-manager-ultra-brooklyn-xpnsajcqy9v2) — Brooklyn, NY
- [Data Operations Associate](https://feeny.ai/job/data-operations-associate-ultra-brooklyn-nnm3pw5a82wx) — Brooklyn, NY
- [Senior Software Infrastructure Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-infrastructure-engineer-ultra-brooklyn-cag4a9js5h01) — Brooklyn, NY
- [Product Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/product-engineer-ultra-brooklyn-292bdydcv44s) — Brooklyn, NY
- [Head of Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-marketing-ultra-brooklyn-rarz21rtmbav) — Brooklyn, NY
- [Head of People](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-people-ultra-brooklyn-g8frrbpfpq6d) — Brooklyn, NY
- [Founding Product](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-product-ultra-brooklyn-4tb57rm0cymn) — Brooklyn, NY
- [Supply Chain and Procurement Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/supply-chain-and-procurement-lead-ultra-brooklyn-p1brfk2ye8wc) — Brooklyn, NY
- [Senior Electrical Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-electrical-engineer-ultra-brooklyn-4qzxkbqmyk7r) — Brooklyn, NY
- [Technical Program Manager, Data & Autonomy](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-program-manager-data-autonomy-ultra-brooklyn-dhe710a88c3r) — Brooklyn, NY