Head of Hardware

We’re looking for someone to take ownership of hardware at Ember. This isn’t a typical “Head of” role. You won’t be handed a roadmap or a team of 20. You’ll be expected to get involved directly—understand problems, build things, fix things, and develop your own view of what we should do next. Your background matters less than your ability to learn quickly, think clearly and build good things.

You’ll take responsibility for hardware across the business. That doesn’t mean you’ll be fixing our buses or installing our chargers yourself—we have a maintenance team and a charging team already set up and working well. Instead, your team does the engineering work to select, adapt or build hardware products that will allow Ember to be the highest-quality, most efficient transport operator out there.

We’re a software company and a hardware company. We think that by being great at both we can deliver a product and experience that goes beyond what currently exists in the industry. We want to take a software approach to hardware and vice-versa, getting the benefits from both approaches.

This spans a broad range of possible projects – both short and long-term – such as:

• Continuing to develop our custom onboard unit for telematics, CCTV, Wi-Fi and more – it’s our own PCB, case and software.
• Driving the next generation of electric coach design forward. This isn’t about sales meetings, it’s about really thinking through what’s possible and how we can get there. Everything from tweaks to our existing product to a clean sheet rebuild.
• Organising fit out of new vehicles. This means procuring stock, training our mechanics and creating a smooth production line.
• Specifying and debugging chargers and battery systems. We operate the fastest chargers in regular use in the UK which presents a lot of interesting data.
• Building out maintenance infrastructure and tooling.
• Using our huge pool of data to get better at predictive maintenance, or even better avoiding issues entirely.
• Figuring out how to make all of this more reliable, cheaper and easier to scale.

We don’t expect you to come in with a perfect plan or even fully developed skills. You’ll learn as you go by getting hands-on quickly, understanding how things actually work (and fail), fixing problems, developing a strong worldview and introducing structure where it genuinely helps.

Some weeks you might be building a quick prototype, 3D printing a bracket or setting up a test rig to debug a long-standing issue. Other times you might hop on a flight to China to meet a supplier or decide to take a coach to pieces.

Over time, you’ll shape what hardware at Ember becomes. This is a role for someone who’s excited by open-ended opportunities, not intimidated by the lack of upfront KPIs. You’ll get to work on real, physical systems at scale — vehicles, energy infrastructure, depots — with the freedom to explore interesting ideas and push things forward. The scope is wide. Today this is work the two founders share; we’re looking for someone who can take it on and make it their own.

We’re a small team. You’ll be working directly with the founders and you'll manage the existing two-person hardware team. You’ll also have access to the rest of the team – everything from skilled mechanics to experienced software engineers.

You’ll need to be comfortable working in an environment where you:

• Build things yourself when that’s fastest.
• Bring in others when that creates leverage.
• Don’t hide behind process or titles.
• Don’t outsource thinking.

We care about quality. That doesn’t mean everything is perfect, but you should know when something is rough and why—and improve it over time. You need taste.

AI tools have changed how we work and have dramatically changed what one person can do. We expect you to use it heavily — write code without waiting for a software engineer, learn a new domain in a weekend instead of a year, draft a design faster than feels reasonable. The leverage is real, but only if you have the underlying engineering judgement to know when the output is good and when it's nonsense.

You’ll receive a salary of £80,000–£120,000 per annum, depending on your experience and skills, plus share options. We intentionally keep this wide because differing levels of experience will be able to take on this role in different ways.

You’ll be expected to work from our office in central Edinburgh most days — we value in-person communication — but there’s flexibility around the odd day from home. We’ll help with relocation to Edinburgh if you’re making the move for us.

At Ember, we support diversity across our team and customers. We work to ensure every employee feels respected and able to give their best, whether temporary, part-time or full-time. We’re happy to offer flexible working patterns where they make sense, are compassionate when it comes to time off and offer enhanced maternity and paternity leave.

Send your CV and a cover letter explaining why this is the role for you. Attach or link to something you’ve built and that you’re proud of (hardware, software or anything else).

You’ll likely have a strong engineering (electrical, mechanical, automotive etc.) background but we’re open to other qualifications if you can demonstrate a genuine passion for hardware – e.g. you’ve built your own projects on the side with genuine craft. You need hands-on credibility with tangible skills such as CAD, circuit design or fabrication. But your mindset matters more than any particular toolkit.

You should have clarity of thought combined with an appreciation of trade-offs across different topics. That means a strong desire to know the details and to understand it yourself. It means knowing that constraints are often more like temporary trade-offs and not physical impossibilities. We often talk about a “Feynman-esque” approach to problem solving as an example of clear, first-principles thinking.

These should sound a lot like you:

• You can figure things out quickly without hand-holding.
• You are precise. You quantify things where it is important.
• You have good taste and high standards for design, functionality and experience.
• You are comfortable jumping between strategy and execution.
• You can manage a small team without becoming detached from the work.
• You can communicate clearly and think in a structured way.
• You can be trusted. You won’t bodge things that are safety critical but you won’t hide behind regulations. If you say it can’t be done we can trust you’ve genuinely explored all avenues.
• Hardware can move slowly. Iteration cycles are long and you’ll have weeks where you feel you’ve achieved nothing because you’re waiting on a supplier in Shenzhen. We need you to be patient with that and constantly looking for ways to fight it — parallelising, prototyping locally, removing dependencies where you can, jumping on a plane and so on.