Recruiter, Hardware
Physical Intelligence· Research· Oct 14, 2026 · 13d ago
San Francisco
In office
Full-time
Senior
$100K–$134K est.
6+ years exp
Job description
Physical Intelligence is bringing general-purpose AI into the physical world. We are a group of engineers, scientists, roboticists, and company builders developing foundation models and learning algorithms to power the robots of today and the physically-actuated devices of the future.
As a full stack Recruiter, you will help build the team that builds the robots - owning high-impact searches across research and engineering.
The Team
The People team at Pi exists to recruit the world’s best talent and provide them the tools and context to do their life’s best work, removing all barriers, physical or digital, save the immense complexity of the problem at hand.
The Recruiting team partners directly with founders and technical leaders to design roles, define talent strategy, and close exceptional candidates. We operate with a high bar, high transparency, and strong market awareness.
About the Role
We design and build our own robots. The engineers who design them, the team that builds them at our factory in Fremont, and the fleet that keeps them running are some of the hardest people in the world to hire, and we need a lot more of them.
As our Hardware Recruiter, you’ll build the team that builds the robots. You’ll partner directly with Adnan Esmail, our co-founder who leads hardware, and with the engineering, factory and fleet leads on his team. You’ll own hiring across mechanical, electrical, firmware and controls engineering, manufacturing, NPI, test, supply chain, and the technicians who build and maintain our robots. You’ll report to Blake Williams. The role is in person in San Francisco, with regular time at our Fremont factory.
In This Role You Will
- Be an owner: hardware recruiting at Pi is yours to build. Build it like you want it. Own every search end to end, from mapping who has actually shipped robots, vehicles, drones and devices at volume to closing them yourself.
- Be a hunter: know the hardware market cold. Know where the best engineers, manufacturing and supply chain people sit, what their titles actually mean (some of the best manufacturing minds at Apple are called TPMs), and who they’d take a call from. Run two motions at once: hand-pick the few dozen people who could own a subsystem, and build a funnel that hires technicians and factory talent every week.
- Play the long game: great hardware people rarely leave in the middle of a build. Know their product cycles, stay close for years if you have to, and be there when the window opens.
- Design interview processes: build loops with our hiring managers that test real work, like prototyping exercises and hands-on trials, and keep interviewers calibrated. Be creative. There is no one-size-fits-all and the “set it and forget it” interview competency architecture is a thing of the past. Moving fast never means skipping the steps that protect the bar.
- Have an opinion: you are the expert. What does it take to move a senior engineer off Tesla or Apple RSUs? When does a sign-on matter? What are we not thinking of? “We hire the top 1%” and “we pay for talent” are where the conversation starts. Bring the numbers.
- Be a partner, be a peer: recruiting at Pi is not a service org. Our hardware leaders are hands-on and stretched, so make their hiring time count, push back on scope and urgency, and keep searches moving while they’re on the floor. You will be in the room either way, with a seat at the table, so you might as well speak up.
- Be a builder: design bespoke closing strategies. Get candidates to Fremont, because nothing closes a hardware engineer like watching robots get built. Build in the open too: we’re a small recruiting team that shares pipelines, tools and referrals, and your playbook should make the rest of us better.
- Be a steward, be an ambassador: treat every candidate with care and respect. How someone feels after a rejection reflects on us. Take that seriously.
What We Hope You'll Bring
- 6+ years of full-cycle recruiting, with a big share of it hiring hardware (mechanical, electrical, firmware, manufacturing, test, supply chain or technician roles) at companies that ship physical products.
- A network you can use on day one. You can name the first ten people you’d call for our open roles, and they’ll pick up.
- Real hardware fluency. You know a design engineer from a manufacturing engineer, what EVT/DVT/PVT means for someone’s willingness to leave, and how a great PCBA supply manager differs from a buyer. You walk out of an intake with a sharper role than you walked in with.
- Range across both sides of hardware: design engineering, and the factory and fleet. Most recruiters spike on one. Tell us which, and show us you can carry the other.
- A high bar you can explain. Everyone says they have one. Show us yours: the hires you’re proudest of, and why they were hard.
- Resilience. If you think you’ve “seen this market before,” you haven’t. None of us have.
- Urgency. The best hardware people are rarely on the market, and the window between builds is short. We don’t wait. We act. “Make it happen” is how we are wired.
- Analytical rigor. This isn’t all feel; it’s a mix of art and science. We work deep in the data, from conversion by source to trial pass rates to why offers are won or lost. We work with scientists; we evidence our actions.
- Genuine curiosity about robots. You want to be at the factory, close to the work you’re hiring for.
Bonus Points
- Built a hardware recruiting function from scratch, or scaled one through a production ramp.
- Hired technicians or factory teams at volume, including hands-on trials.
- Run senior hardware leadership searches (Director and above).
- Recruited at robotics, AV, drone, aerospace or consumer electronics companies.
- Familiarity with AI-powered recruiting tools and automation workflows. We build our own.
Application prep
Use the role’s language and application details while tailoring your materials.
Keywords to mirror
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