Director, Hardware Engineering

Job description

**About Perry Weather** Perry Weather is the weather safety standard for organizations that operate outdoors. We combine on-site weather hardware with a software platform that automates alerts, siren activations, and safety decisions for more than 3,000 organizations — from the PGA of America, the NFL, and MLB to Turner Construction, thousands of school districts, cities, and golf courses. We've grown 80%+ annually for five consecutive years, and are continuing to grow. We're headquartered in Dallas at The Centrum, in the Oak Lawn neighborhood, where our teams work together every day to help organizations make faster and safer decisions when weather puts people, assets, and operations at risk. **About the Role** Hardware is the backbone of what we sell. Our weather stations and outdoor warning systems are the part of Perry Weather a customer can walk up to and touch, and they run unattended on solar power through heat, storms, and winter. When a device goes quiet, the customer loses confidence in a safety system they built their policies around. We're looking for a Director of Hardware Engineering to own the execution of that function end-to-end. Reporting directly to the CTO, you'll lead our hardware and firmware engineers, own the roadmap and the schedule commitments behind it, partner closely with our manufacturing team to turn designs into deployed units, and be accountable for how our devices perform in the field. This is a hands-on leadership role on a small team. You'll be in design reviews, at the bench, and in the firmware, and you'll hire the people who scale it from here. If you're looking to manage managers and run a review cadence, this isn't that job. If you've wanted to own a device business outright and have the engineering depth to do it credibly, it is. **Responsibilities** The team and the bar - Lead, coach, and grow our hardware and firmware engineers. At this size every hire moves the average, so hiring well is a core part of the job. - Set the engineering standards: schematic and layout review, code review, test coverage, documentation, and what has to be true before a design moves to the next phase. - Build the career path so strong engineers can grow into senior and lead roles as the team expands. Execution and delivery - Own the hardware and firmware roadmap and the dates attached to it. Turn product direction into resourced plans with phase gates, and hold them. - Own firmware release management across the deployed fleet: staged rollout, verification, rollback, and the update process that makes shipping to devices in the field routine. - Be accountable for what ships and when. Surface slips early, with the tradeoff already thought through. Field reliability - Own field reliability as a tracked number: failure rates by cause, RMA volume and root cause, time between failures, and warranty cost. - Close the loop from the field back into design. Telemetry, returned units, and support escalations should each change the next revision or the next firmware release. - Own fleet diagnostics and observability so we find problems in the field before customers report them. Firmware and device software - Own the embedded platform: C++ applications on ARM Linux, connectivity over cellular, provisioning, over-the-air updates, and the security posture of devices deployed on customer property. - Hold firmware to modern software practices. Automated tests, hardware-in-the-loop coverage, CI, and code review so device software gets the same rigor as anything else we ship. - Expect your team to build with AI coding agents, and be deliberate about verification. Firmware mistakes reach customers on rooftops and jobsites, where a bad release is expensive to undo. Partner across the company - Work with our manufacturing team on build readiness, test procedures, and quality. You own the engineering side of that handoff: production documentation, engineering change orders, sign-off when a component has to be substituted, and driving corrective actions back into the design when something escapes the line. - Work with Product and our hardware PM on what we build next and be the engineering voice on feasibility, cost, and risk. - Work with our platform and software teams on the device-to-cloud contract so hardware and software behave as one system. - Work with Support and CX on the install experience, RMA process, and field learnings, and bring failure patterns back into the roadmap. **Requirements** - 10+ years in hardware or embedded engineering, including 3+ years leading engineers directly. You've led a team through a full product cycle. - Physical products you've shipped at volume, through the full development and validation sequence and into production with a contract manufacturer. You know where these programs slip. - Credibility in both domains. You don't need to be our strongest electrical engineer or firmware engineer, but you need to review both competently and hold the respect of the people doing the work. - A device you made dependable. You inherited or shipped hardware with a field reliability problem, found the causes, and drove the fix through design, firmware, and manufacturing. - Design-for-manufacturing judgment: DFM and DFT, yield and test strategy, and the design choices that drive unit cost. - Embedded Linux and connected-device depth. Board bring-up, OTA and rollback, low-power and power-budget design, and cellular connectivity in places with poor coverage. - Judgment about instrumentation. You've built or bought the diagnostics that let a small team support a large deployed fleet. - Hiring track record. You can attract hardware and firmware engineers in a market where they're scarce. - Actively building with AI today. You have a view on where it helps engineering work and where its output needs to be verified before it reaches a device. - High agency and urgency. You bring proposals rather than waiting for direction, and you close loops without being asked. **A strong plus is** ruggedized or outdoor equipment, solar and battery-powered systems; industrial sensing and protocols, audio or high-power output systems; fleet management of thousands of units; and experience in safety-critical or regulated products. **Benefits** - **You'll want to come into the office.** Our Oak Lawn office isn't just a place to sit — it's where ideas move fast and culture stays strong. The whole team is here Monday through Friday, which means real collaboration, no chasing people down over Slack, and a genuinely fun place to spend your work days. - **Your wellbeing is covered.** Competitive health insurance, 401(k) with employer matching, and a full suite of voluntary benefits, because you shouldn't have to think twice about the basics. - **Good people, good times.** Monthly All-Hands, Office Olympics, happy hours, and more. We take the work seriously and the culture seriously too. - **You're getting in early, and that matters.** We're growing fast, but the biggest opportunities are still ahead. The people joining now will help shape what Perry Weather becomes.