The Subvocal Company
Talk to your computer without talking
Head of Hardware
About the role
We are looking for someone to take Subvocal from a working research system built with laboratory equipment to a reliable wearable that someone can use in the real world.
This is a systems role. Our hardware combines sensitive physiological sensing, mixed-signal electronics, embedded and FPGA systems, high-speed data acquisition, wireless communication, batteries, firmware, mechanical constraints, and eventually custom ASICs. All of those pieces have to work together inside a device that is small, comfortable, stable, and manufacturable.
The difficult part is that this is not ordinary consumer electronics. The hardware is part of the measurement itself. Changing a cable, ground plane, enclosure, sensor position, or power system can alter the data distribution seen by the model. You will work closely with the sensing and ML leads to preserve signal quality while aggressively reducing size, power consumption, and complexity.
Some of the problems you will own include:
- Designing custom mixed-signal, sensing, compute, power, and communications electronics.
- Integrating ADCs, DACs, FPGAs, MCUs, sensor front ends, memory, and wireless systems.
- Building portable prototypes that are reliable enough for large-scale data collection.
- Miniaturizing the system into a small wearable and eventually a pair of glasses.
- Designing for signal integrity, low noise, thermal performance, battery life, and electromagnetic compatibility.
- Writing or overseeing embedded firmware, acquisition pipelines, device control, logging, and update systems.
- Working with industrial designers and mechanical engineers on enclosure, fit, charging, and serviceability.
- Owning component selection, BOM, prototype builds, DFM, DFT, regulatory preparation, contract manufacturers, and the path from EVT through production.
- Building the hardware team and external manufacturing network around you.
You might be a great fit if you have previously taken a difficult hardware product from an early prototype toward production, ideally in wearables, sensing, medical devices, robotics, AR/VR, or another tightly constrained system. You should be comfortable debugging boards at a bench, reading a schematic, working with firmware and FPGA engineers, making mechanical tradeoffs, and managing outside design or manufacturing partners without becoming dependent on them.
We care much more about whether you have repeatedly made real hardware work than whether your previous title was senior enough. The right person will be equally comfortable deciding the overall architecture and personally finding the broken clock, noisy regulator, thermal issue, or intermittent connector that is preventing the prototype from working.
You will have enormous ownership over both the Demo Day device and the architecture that eventually ships to customers.
This is a full-time, in-person role in San Francisco.
About The Subvocal Company
The Subvocal Company (YC F26) is building a wearable that lets you communicate with computers without speaking out loud.
Our goal is to turn deliberate subvocal speech, words you form internally without producing an audible voice or overt movement, into text and commands. Imagine writing an email, coding, searching the web, or talking to an AI at the speed of speech while sitting in a quiet office, on a train, or in the middle of a meeting, without anyone around you hearing a word or seeing you do anything.
Making this work requires solving an unusually difficult sensing and machine learning problem. The broader technical design space includes RF sensing, EMG, EEG, mmWave, and other non-invasive physiological sensing methods. For competitive and IP reasons, we are not publicly disclosing the exact architecture of our current system yet. What we can say is that we have already built prototypes that decode continuous subvocal speech at 200+ words per minute with high accuracy from real physiological signals, and we are now turning that research into a portable device that can work across people after a short calibration.
We are a small team in San Francisco, backed by Y Combinator and Afore Capital, along with some incredible angels. We move extremely quickly, build most things from first principles, and work across sensing, machine learning, embedded systems, hardware, and product design. The people joining now will not be optimizing a mature product or working on one narrow subsystem. They will help make foundational technical decisions, own entire areas of the company, and shape what this interface ultimately becomes.
We think silent speech will become a new fundamental way humans interact with computers. If working on something that still sounds slightly like science fiction, but is rapidly becoming a real engineering problem, sounds exciting to you, we would love to hear from you.
