Lead, AI Hardware Design Skunkworks

Job description

ROLE HIGHLIGHTS - Location: Valencia (Paterna), Spain - Department: [confirm department/LoB] - Reports to: VP Engineering, ICEYE Spain - Employment type: Permanent - Workplace model: Onsite, in the room with the team - SUPO: Employment is subject to applicable security screening. Parts of this work fall under export control. WHY THIS ROLE MATTERS ICEYE builds radar satellites, and nobody yet knows where AI turns a week of hardware design into an afternoon. The vendors who claim to know are mostly wrong. So we're setting up a five-person skunkworks in Valencia to find out, by building real hardware with AI - outside of the program schedules with a pure focus on finding the things that “move the needle”. You'll hire the team of four or five builders and build alongside them. "Lead" here means first builder. You get a room next to the lab and a budget you spend without an approval process, and the team keeps two standing obligations: build something every week and show it to the rest of ICEYE every month. WHO WE ARE ICEYE is the world leader in sovereign intelligence from space. We deliver persistent monitoring capabilities to detect and respond to changes in any location on Earth. ICEYE owns the world's largest and most advanced SAR (synthetic aperture radar) satellite constellation. To our customers we provide intelligence with unmatched quality, latency and revisit times, in any weather, day or night. To governments who choose to operate their own constellation we provide this proven capability as a sovereign system. ICEYE-built constellations serve customers in defence and intelligence, environmental monitoring, insurance and emergency management. We enable fast decisions that contribute to a safer future. Founded and headquartered in Finland, ICEYE operates globally with over 1000 employees across Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. YOUR DAY-TO-DAY RESPONSIBILITIES - Build the team: bring in 4 to 5 builders covering electrical (power and digital), RF, mechanical, and agents and tooling. You choose them, and the sponsor holds a veto. - Pick the problems and build them yourself: work only on real design intent, with real frequency bands, power levels, launch loads and interfaces. Think a representative X-band receive chain, a payload power distribution board, a bracket family or a digital backend. Toy problems teach us nothing about where AI breaks. - Run the bet portfolio: keep six to ten live bets, each with an owner and a one-line "this is dead if". The team reviews them monthly and decides to continue, graduate or kill. Roughly a third should die each quarter, including yours. - Hold the budget and spend it: you have full budget authority, with a same-day conversation with the sponsor for anything above 50k. Spend is reported in one table on the demo day slide, and that is the whole finance process. - Get what works into production hands: a capability has graduated when an engineer outside the team uses it without you in the room. That takes a working tool, a one-page how-to, the notebook pages behind it, and one of your people sitting with the receiving team for a month. - Run the team rhythm: something physical or runnable every week, and a public demo day every month that anyone at ICEYE can walk into. Failures get shown too, because they usually teach more. You won't write status reports or sit on steering committees. Spending below the limits needs nobody's permission. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR We're looking for a tinkerer who finishes things. Both halves matter equally, and the combination is rare. You probably have a bench at home with something on it nobody asked for, and it works. You also have a day job designing real hardware to real requirements, so you know the difference between a clever prototype and a thing that survives launch. MUST HAVES - Hardware you designed and shipped yourself (circuit boards, RF chains, mechanisms or structures, any one of them), taken from intent to something measured on a bench - Instincts that come from hardware that got built, measured and signed off, including the judgement to tell when a simulation is lying to you - Code you're not embarrassed by, Python at minimum, because you'll be inside the agent loop daily - Hands-on use of modern AI tooling, with specific opinions about where it's useless - At least one unreasonable thing you built fast, and the ability to show it to us - Experience hiring people, or clear evidence that you know a builder when you meet one - Working English (Spanish helps and isn't required) NICE TO HAVES - Space, defence or another high-reliability domain, so qualification campaigns hold no surprises - Code-defined EDA or CAD, such as atopile, KiCad scripting, build123d or something you wrote yourself - Simulation in the loop (SPICE, FEA or full-wave EM), enough to know when the answer is wrong - Experience running a small team with its own money HOW YOU WORK - You're creative and you deliver. You start unreasonable things and finish enough of them, and you have taste in what to abandon. - You take risks deliberately. You'll spend two weeks attacking the thing everyone says can't be done, write down exactly how it failed, and stop. - You lead through change. You can keep four people steady while everything around them is uncertain, and help them tell the one result worth another month from the demo that will never survive a real requirement. - You're honest in the room. You can tell an executive or a vendor that something doesn't work, without softening it into a recommendation. This may not be the role for you if you want a predictable workday, if you need phases and gates to feel safe, if you lead mainly by reviewing other people's work, or your best story about building something is more than ten years old. WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE - First 4 weeks: the one-page charter is agreed with the sponsor and the team structure is defined. - By week 12: you've started building before hiring finishes, you and the team have chosen the first two or three design problems, and the bench has its first instruments. - End of month 3: first internal demo day, in whatever state things are in. That date doesn't move. - Over the 18 months: capabilities graduate into production use by engineers outside the team. APPLICATION PROCESS You've probably been turned down for jobs like this one. A CV that reads as scattered, a degree that doesn't match the title, a stint running your own thing that didn't become a company: we read that pattern as a plus. Send us your CV and show us what you built. Interview stages: 1. Recruiter Screen 2. Show us something you built and talk us through what went wrong in it. 3. Spend a day building something with us, on a real problem, with the tools you'd actually use. There's no case study, no panel and no competency grid. We discuss export control and personnel screening openly in the first conversation. WORKING AT ICEYE At ICEYE, you'll join a diverse and highly engaged team united by the ambition to make the impossible possible. As a global scale-up, we combine speed and ambition with the opportunity to take real ownership from day one. Your growth, wellbeing, and success are a priority, with continuous professional development, training opportunities, and a culture where collaboration is how we win. HOW WE WORK (OUR VALUES) - Make the impossible possible: We set ambitious goals and stay calm under pressure. We bring grit, optimism, and ownership when things get hard, and we keep moving until we find a way. - Be curious: Go deep, ask questions, listen carefully, and think critically. Understand the "why" behind decisions. - See the big picture: Stay close to what's happening across the company so you can make better decisions. Consider how your work affects others. - Drive effective teamwork: Create psychological safety, invite different perspectives, and build inclusive teams. There are no bad questions. - Act as one team: We win together. We match tasks to the right owner and stay agile as priorities shift. - Have fun: What we do matters, and it should be enjoyable. Celebrate progress, take pride in results, and share the wins. BENEFITS Our benefits are designed to support your health and wellbeing, at work and beyond. We keep improving them based on employee feedback, and offerings vary by location. Talent Acquisition will confirm what applies for this role and location during the process. This role also comes with a competitive salary and equity. OUR COMMITMENT TO DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION We want ICEYE to be a place where people can be themselves and do great work. Different backgrounds and perspectives make us stronger, which is why we work to create an environment where people feel included, respected, and able to speak up. Whatever your background, we want you to bring your authentic self to the table. We're committed to fair, inclusive hiring and equal opportunity. Everyone is welcome to apply. If you need any adjustments or support during the recruitment process, tell us, and we'll do our best to help. Apply now to start your ICEYE journey, and help us continue to make the impossible possible together. Read more about ICEYE and working with us at iceye.com http://iceye.com.