Dexterous Hands Lead (Founding Team Lead)

Location: Munich
Team: R&D
Type: Full time, Permanent
Experience: Experienced (7-10 years)

Your mission

You will build Vesoma’s hands development group from the ground up. Starting as its first member, you will define how our humanoids manipulate the world: what we buy, what we build, and how hand hardware and learning-based control come together on our platform.
In the near term you will get capable third-party hands running reliably on our robots so that development and deployment are never blocked. In parallel you will set the technical direction for our own dexterous hands, build the team that develops them, and take the first in-house generations from concept to robust, deployable hardware.

Key responsibilities

Own the hands engineering roadmap. Make and defend the build-versus-buy decisions, define the architecture for in-house hands, and plan the path from first prototypes to a product that holds up in real deployments.
Build and lead the team. Hire the first engineers across mechanical design, actuation, sensing and embedded electronics, and set up the processes, tooling and test infrastructure the group needs to move fast without cutting corners.
Drive the design of our own hands, including kinematics, actuation and transmission concepts, tactile and proprioceptive sensing, and the electrical and communication interfaces to our control and software stacks. Design for robustness, serviceability and manufacturability from the start.
Bridge the gap with external hardware. Evaluate the global ecosystem of robotic hands, select and manage suppliers, and lead the mechanical and electrical integration of third-party end-effectors until our own hardware takes over.
Establish validation as a core discipline. Develop test rigs, benchmarks and endurance protocols that measure precision, force, duty cycle, durability and real-world task performance, and use the results to drive design decisions.
Work closely with our AI team so that hand hardware fits our learning-based approach, with attention to sensing quality, backdrivability, contact robustness and transfer from simulation to reality.
Bring safety into the design early, in line with the standards work our company helps shape.

Your profile

You have built dexterous or comparably complex mechatronic systems yourself and want the chance to do it again, this time with ownership of the whole effort. You combine deep hands-on engineering with the judgment to set direction and the drive to build a team around it.

Experience

8+ years in robotics hardware, mechatronics or system integration, with significant hands-on work on robotic hands, grippers or other high-DoF manipulation systems.
A track record of taking hardware from concept through multiple prototype iterations to a working, tested system.
Experience leading engineers or technical workstreams, ideally including hiring and building a team.

Core skills

Strong understanding of actuation and transmission choices for compact, high-DoF systems (direct drive, tendon-driven, gear and linkage designs) and their tradeoffs in force, speed, backdrivability, efficiency and wear.
Experience with tactile and force sensing and how sensor data feeds into control and learning.
Mechanical design for small, dense, robust assemblies, including CAD, tolerancing, material choice and design for manufacturing and assembly.
Electrical and embedded fundamentals: motor drivers, sensor interfaces, communication buses, firmware integration.
Fundamental software skills, solid grasp of real-time control requirements.
Comfort with kinematics, linear algebra, coordinate systems and 3D transformations.
Willingness to get your hands dirty: rapid prototyping, wiring, soldering and assembly.

Mindset

You think like a builder and an owner. You make clear technical decisions under uncertainty, explain them well, and change course when the data says so.
You care about reliability above showcase demos. Hands that work consistently in the field matter more to you than hands that look impressive once.
You enjoy building something from zero: the hardware, the team and the way they work together.

Why us?

The Team: Work alongside leadership with a proven track record of building unicorn-scale companies and defining global robotics standards.
Smart Strategy: We operate as disciplined fast followers. Capital is timed to the deployment inflection point, avoiding early-mover dead ends to scale fast on proven foundations.
Resources: We are substantially internally funded and attract top-tier investors to avoid any capital constraints for our mission.
Historic Opportunity: Join at the dawn of a new industry comparable to the rise of the automobile. Help shape the European champion in this trillion-dollar market.