Senior Hardware R&D and Manufacturing Engineer

Find out what is worth building next. Then make it real. Rotterdam, hybrid (at least two days a week in the office) · Full-time · EUR 5200 and EUR 5800 gross per month, plus 8% holiday allowance and stock options · Several trips a year to our manufacturing partners in Asia, including a couple of weeks during production runs · English and/or Dutch · Candidates from across Europe welcome Speaksee builds live subtitling and translation products for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Our aim is to make accessible communication the norm across Europe by 2030: 100,000 deaf and hard-of-hearing people and 10,000 venues. We are looking for the person who finds out what we should build next. You follow where technology is going, turn possibilities into experiments, and give a grounded answer on what is worth pursuing. When we commit to something involving hardware, you carry it all the way from your bench to a product leaving the factory. Along the way, you take over the production of what we already make. This is a senior individual-contributor role. You will not manage people, but you will have significant technical ownership, shape the R&D direction and will make clear recommendations on where we place our engineering bets. The role Initially, most of your time will go into R&D and the handover of our existing hardware and manufacturing setup. As our next Soundshape production run approaches in summer 2027, manufacturing becomes a much larger part of the job. We want our Soundshape product that currently uses cloud computing to execute our transcribing,translation needs to be fully running locally. So it can work without any network access and we are committed to getting there. What that product looks like, what it runs on, how much should happen locally, and what needs to become technically or economically possible before it works are open questions. You help us answer them. You work closely with our CEO, Jari, and the rest of the Product Team. Jari brings the product vision and a deep understanding of our users and market. Your job is to establish what is technically possible: whether an idea holds up when you build it, what the trade-offs are, what it would take to make it a product, and what is not worth pursuing. Your recommendations should be backed by evidence: something you built, tested or measured. Research and experiments You investigate technologies that could change what Speaksee can build: audio, wireless, edge compute, embedded systems, speech and translation models, networked AV, and areas we have not spotted yet. An experiment is not a small version of the product. It is the cheapest thing you can build to answer one specific question, for example whether Dante runs on a given chip or how a speech recognition engine performs on our audio. It can be quick, rough and standalone, and it has done its job once we know the answer. You frame the question, choose what to measure, build enough to find out, and communicate clearly whether we should continue, change direction or stop. From experiment to product A proof of concept is different from an experiment. By that point, it should work well enough inside our platform to tell us whether the complete idea holds up. You build those proofs of concept alongside our product engineers rather than developing something in isolation and handing it over afterwards. The hardware remains yours throughout: architecture, prototypes, design decisions, suppliers, manufacturing and what we learn once units are in customers' hands. Build the R&D process We want R&D to be fast without becoming random. You help us develop a lightweight, repeatable way to investigate technical opportunities: framing the question, deciding what evidence is enough, documenting what we learned and making clear decisions about what happens next. The goal is not more process. It is better decisions and knowledge that stays inside Speaksee rather than disappearing when a project ends. Run what we already make Our next Soundshape production run is planned for summer 2027, and you will take ownership of it. For that run, you work alongside the founder who designed much of the current hardware and built the manufacturing setup and is now stepping back from this work. It is a planned handover: you get a full production cycle to learn the product, suppliers, manufacturing partners and process before it becomes yours. You own the engineering side around production: BOM targets, supplier issues, incoming inspection, yield and quality. You also build a proper returns loop so that failures in the field become improvements in either the product or the production process. Set up what comes next Every new hardware product needs a route into production. You build it. That includes supplier selection and qualification, negotiating directly with suppliers, tooling, design for manufacturing, costed BOMs, moulding and finishing decisions, quality controls and the certification work required to put the product on the market. This is why R&D and manufacturing sit together in this role: the person making early technical choices also understands what those choices mean once thousands of components, tooling, suppliers and production processes are involved. You are part of the Product Team, alongside three engineers on the software side, and report to our Head of Product Bob. What a good first year looks like A technology direction for the next Soundshape that the team understands and believes in, backed by experiments you ranSeveral R&D experiments that gave a clear yes, no or not-yet answer on whether to pursue an ideaA lightweight R&D process that makes our experiments and decisions easier to repeat, review and learn fromThe summer 2027 Soundshape production run delivered on time and to quality, with you thereYou know our supply chain well: where the risks are, where it could be improved and which improvements are worth making firstA clear, evidence-based answer on where we should manufacture, whether or not that means changing anythingEvery returned unit has a documented failure cause, and the top three causes have a fix in either the design or production process What you bring Hardware brought into production. You have taken a physical product from prototype into manufacturing and stayed involved through the problems that followed. We care more about what you shipped and owned than your exact number of years of experience.Electronics design fluency. You are comfortable with schematics, PCB design, components, enclosures and mechanical trade-offs, and can judge architecture and engineering work confidently.Hardware and software prototyping. You can build end-to-end prototypes yourself to answer technical questions quickly. The code does not need to be production-ready, but it should be sane, adjustable and understandable.Production ownership. You have worked directly with suppliers and manufacturing partners, including sourcing, qualification and negotiation, and can reason about BOM cost, tooling, moulding, assembly and yield.Analytical judgement. You use data to test assumptions and know the difference between a failed experiment, a failed implementation and a bad idea.Curiosity. You actively follow developments in hardware, embedded systems, AI models and related technologies and think about what they could make possible for our products.Clear communication. You can explain technical uncertainty, trade-offs and recommendations clearly in English and/or Dutch.Experience with any of the following is useful, but we do not expect one person to have all of it: Audio hardwareEmbedded systemsEdge AI or on-device inferenceNetworked AV (for instance: Dante)CE, RED, FCC or other product certification processes(Asian) contract manufacturersHigh-volume plastics, tooling or mouldingRunning R&D as a repeatable process If you have most of what we are looking for and the rest looks learnable, apply anyway. Tell us what you are strong at and which part you would be growing into. What we offer Immediate, visible social impactSignificant influence over what we research, what we build and how we manufacture itSalary between EUR 5200 and EUR 5800 gross per month based on 40 hours, plus 8% holiday allowance, depending on experienceParticipation in the Employee Stock Option PoolGenerous holiday policyHybrid working, with at least two days a week in our office in the centre of RotterdamA culture built around trust and flexibilityA modern laptop or MacBookNS Business Card, car travel allowance and/or Swapfiets subscriptionVisa sponsorship for suitable candidatesA team of 16 where you can make decisions without working through five layers of approval About Speaksee Speaksee is a fast-growing Rotterdam company with 16 employees. In 2017, Speaksee was founded by Jari Hazelebach together with Marcel van der Ven, inspired by his own parents being deaf. This made him see how incredibly difficult it was for them to follow conversations in meetings, family gatherings and many other situations. The Speaksee Microphone Kit was launched on the market at the end of 2022 and since then Speaksee has been working with leading customers such as PwC, KPN, Rabobank, UWV, Municipality of Rotterdam and many other organisations that have taken the step towards an inclusive working environment for everyone. The Soundshape 1 Pro was launched on the market in 2025 and has been helping event organisers and venues make their events fully accessible to the deaf, hard of hearing and non-native speakers since then.