Head of Hardware

About the role

As Head of Hardware , you will lead the development of Rune's hardware product suite and own all aspects of hardware engineering across the company. You will be responsible for the full lifecycle of hardware development, from early concept exploration and rapid prototyping through design, validation, manufacturing, and deployment in operational environments. This is a foundational leadership role that will define how hardware is built at Rune. You will establish the technical vision, engineering processes, and organizational structure required to develop mission-critical systems that can be deployed at scale. Working closely with company leadership, you will help identify and prioritize new hardware opportunities that expand Rune's product portfolio and deliver meaningful operational advantage to military users. You must have demonstrated experience building and shipping zero-to-one hardware products satisfying MIL-STD requirements to real world military environments, coupled with a deep understanding of how modern technologies can be leveraged to support military missions. You have a background in and understanding of how electrical, mechanical and software engineering must co-develop to create hardware solutions. The ideal candidate combines strong technical judgment with proven leadership experience in high-stakes environments, and is capable of making sound decisions under uncertainty while maintaining a relentless focus on execution. This role carries significant cross-functional responsibility. You will work closely with the Head of Software and Head of Platform to ensure hardware, software, and infrastructure development efforts are tightly coordinated from concept through deployment. You will also partner with the company's Growth and Mission Success teams to ensure Rune's hardware systems are designed for real-world operational use and can be rapidly iterated based on user feedback. You will be responsible for recruiting exceptional talent, establishing a culture of technical excellence and ownership, and creating the systems required to scale the organization as Rune grows. While this is a senior leadership position, you should be comfortable remaining deeply technical and hands-on, personally contributing to critical engineering decisions, design reviews, prototyping efforts, and technical problem-solving when needed. You will report directly to the Chief Technology Officer and serve as a key member of Rune's technical leadership team, helping shape the company's long-term product strategy and engineering direction.

Responsibilities

• Lead all aspects of hardware engineering at Rune, defining the technical vision, roadmap, and execution strategy for the company's hardware product portfolio.
• Own the end-to-end hardware development lifecycle, from concept generation and rapid prototyping through validation, manufacturing, deployment, and sustainment in operational environments.
• Work directly with military operators, program stakeholders, and senior defense leaders to understand mission requirements, identify capability gaps, and translate operational challenges into deployable technical solutions.
• Build, lead, and mentor a high-performing team of hardware engineers across multiple disciplines, establishing a culture of technical excellence, ownership, urgency, and mission focus.
• Recruit exceptional engineering talent and develop the organizational structure, processes, and technical standards required to scale the hardware organization as the company grows.
• Remain deeply technical and hands-on, personally contributing to architecture decisions, design reviews, prototyping efforts, testing activities, and critical engineering challenges when needed.
• Drive technical decision-making across electrical, mechanical, firmware, systems, manufacturing, and integration domains, balancing speed, reliability, performance, and cost.
• Establish rigorous engineering processes for testing, validation, quality assurance, reliability, and field readiness to ensure products perform in d

Benefits

Additional Information

About Rune Rune Technologies builds mission-critical software for military logistics and sustainment. Our flagship product is TyrOS, an AI-enabled logistics command and control platform that gives commanders a single, real-time operating picture of their sustainment fight, from inventory and distribution to medical and operational planning, even in degraded and contested environments. We're not a traditional defense contractor. We're a small, fast-moving team that combines deep operational experience in and with the DoD with the software discipline of the best product companies, and we apply that combination to a customer set that desperately needs it. We stay close to our users by embedding directly with military units during exercises and rotations, and we ship constantly based on what we learn. The U.S. military and its allies face a real logistics modernization problem. We're building the software to solve it.

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