Anvil Robotics

Head of Robot Hardware

San Francisco, CA

Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 6 days ago

LinuxRESTSketchSupply ChainPCB DesignRoboticsMechanical DesignResearchLeadershipActuators

About the role

You'll be the person who takes Anvil's next robot from a sketch of what it should do to a physical machine that ships at scale.
Very few robotics companies at any stage can say that.
The devkits we ship are the wedge, not the business.

We own and operate our own manufacturing.
This is not a revision of the OpenARM line. The new robot is a clean-sheet design - new kinematics, designed from scratch - and the first product built around our custom force-sensing actuators.
Direct ownership of DFM, tooling, and production readiness on Anvil's own manufacturing line in Taipei, and direct engagement with the component vendors (sheet metal, CNC, motors, electronics) who feed it.
ramped on OpenARM/OpenYAM's design history and lessons learned, the force-sensing actuator program, and the in-house Taipei production line and vendor relationships.
Teardown of existing competitor products who have shipped in volume to learn from their designs.

Bachelor's or Master's in mechanical engineering, mechatronics, or a related field.
A PhD is not required - this is a build it and ship it role, not a research role.
A typical req for a role like this might ask for 8-10+ years and prior "Head of Hardware" experience

You'll work daily alongside mechanical and electrical engineers, plus our in-house production team and component vendors, but you won't be their formal manager.
Anvil is small enough that this role is about technical direction and judgment, not headcount.
You'll report to a mix of the CEO and CTO - practically, mostly the CEO, who sits in Taipei next to the rest of the hardware team day to day.
Not a people management role.
Those are owned by specialist engineers
your job is system level judgment and integration across their work, plus genuine depth in one or two of those areas.
If you've never taken something through a real manufacturing ramp, this isn't the right seat yet.

Anvil is building the platform layer for Physical AI - robotics hardware and software that's radically more accessible and suitable for a new generation of intelligent automation than legacy industrial solutions.
Sourcing and production were built in-house from scratch, and in our first 12 months, on that line, we built and shipped 200+ robots (OpenARM and OpenYAM manipulators, paired with a custom Linux Devbox, and teleop kits, cameras, and end effectors) to customers like NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Toyota, Google, Cobot, and Path Robotics in 60+ countries, while we grew from two founders to 30 people across three offices.
Anvil has real hardware DNA - the devkit class hardware line already ships to customers - but no one is yet owning the next generation deployment ready platform, from concept through mass production.

This listing is sourced directly from Anvil Robotics's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.