Every material should be able to describe itself

Frontier AI has consumed nearly everything humans have written and photographed. It knows almost nothing about physical reality. Not because the world is unknowable, but because measuring it was assumed to cost more than the answer was worth. Entire industries run overprovisioned and underutilized because they cannot measure what matters.

Flying Wire solves that. We build pixels: self-contained computers smaller than a grain of sand, embedded directly into the materials around us. The most mundane of materials, tape, drywall, textiles, become intelligent surfaces that are programmable and describable.

We believe the world is radically underinstrumented and untouchable by compute. We believe the next computing revolution will be the ambient one. We believe the future is where hundreds or thousands of computers exist all around you making the physical world a programmable and responsive surface. The hardware is the pixel. The product is how we get those pixels into the world.

You will own our bolt-on business: the products that get pixels into the world today, reveal where hardware abundance creates exceptional value, and generate the customer evidence that informs what Flying Wire becomes tomorrow.

What We're Asking of You

Get on the ground with the customer
We are building for physical industries and infrastructure — places where the digital revolution has not yet fully reached. Your job is not to wait for customers to tell us what to build. It is to run disciplined, tightly scoped searches for where hardware abundance creates exceptional value.

You will start with a concrete question: for example, where does dense thermal sensing materially improve the control of a high-value physical system? Then you’ll get into the field, map the workflow, understand the technical advocate and economic buyer, quantify the value, and run the evaluation far enough to force a decision: double down, modify, or kill.

Spend time in a hot aircraft in Salt Lake. Walk the halls of data centers. Climb cracking towers at a refinery. Get the product into the hands of the people closest to the problem, but do not confuse curiosity with demand. Your job is to separate interesting use cases from repeatable ones, then build the general product behind the strongest signals rather than solving one customer at a time.

Demonstrate the business value of hardware abundance

We’ve been trained to equate hardware with cost. 75+% of IoT pilots fail, not because they don’t deliver value, but because that value is so hard to capture at scale. Your job will be to bridge the world between product and results. You must design and demonstrate products that change the conversation around hardware from a backup plan to the first idea. And then you need to prove to customers how a world of hardware abundance can deliver huge value to their businesses.
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Run the technical evaluation to a signed contract**

Getting hardware into a customer’s hands is the start, not the finish. You own the technical evaluation end to end: qualifying the engineer or technician who becomes the internal champion, running the pilot so it actually proves the thing that gets budget approved, and building the internal case that champion needs to carry up to their own leadership. A great pilot that never gets escalated is a failed pilot. Your job is to make sure it doesn’t stay contained to one person’s curiosity, and instead turns into an organizational yes.You’ll partner directly with the CEO to move from customer to technical qualification through a proven pilot to large scale sales.
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Own the Roadmap, and P&L**

Our first product is thermal sensing tape. You will own what comes next in the bolt-on portfolio. Own the roadmap and how we deliver from soup to nuts. Work with engineering, finance, and leadership to make decisions about hardware, firmware, and what we sell next. As bolt-on proves out, this role grows into ownership of the P&L and the team needed to support it; that’s where it goes, not where it starts. We are not hiring someone to build to a spec. We are hiring the person who helps write it.

What We Think It Takes

• You have designed, operated, and owned products from beginning to end. You’re used to the physical world and its unreliability: sensors, vehicles, industrial equipment, scientific instruments. You have been paged at 2am to get everything back on track.

• You’ve run a technical sale or pilot program from first contact to signed contract, and you know how to build the internal case a champion needs to bring to their own leadership.

• You have real opinions about why promising physical technologies fail to cross from prototype to scaled deployment and what you would do differently.

• You have worked with simulation and know the benefits and limits of computational simulation

• You treat data contracts, lineage, and product observability as part of the build, not as cleanup afterwards.

• You don’t accept the status quo, and get motivated when people tell you something can’t be done.

We do not have hard requirements for degrees or years of experience. We are looking for intellectual curiosity and for engineering judgment good enough to be trusted alone. Customers will make expensive decisions about their facilities and products based on what this platform tells them, and readings we lose or corrupt cannot be collected again. That sets the bar. If you read the list above and immediately started thinking about how you would build it, we should talk.

Why Flying Wire

• This is a founding-level seat. Flying Wire is a hardware company in the old school — focused on making impossible products with science fiction like tech. We don’t yet have a platform, we have prototypes. You will build the externally facing product function and set the tone from day one. You report directly to the CEO and sit in every major tradeoff between hardware, product, and data. Make your case, own the outcome.

• You own the product stack. From pixel interface to API, and what we commercialize next. If you find a customer / product fit that needs our product, we’ll buld the product to serve it

• The people. Our CTO invented the manufacturing process and is a professor of chemical engineering at Georgia Tech. Our engineering leads come from Georgia Tech, Stanford, and Festo. Our advisors include the former CMO of Wiliot and a hardware leader from Logitech.

• The hard part is behind us. Five years of DARPA and NSF funding, exclusively licensed from Georgia Tech. The pixels work, customers are already paying, and the volume only goes up from here.

• Freshly funded. We just closed an oversubscribed seed round from top tier VCs. The runway and the mandate both exist, and the budget to hire and lead your own team comes with the next raise.

Send a short note, CV or LinkedIn, and a brief description of a pilot or technical evaluation you ran that converted into a signed contract to Mike at mike@flyingwire.io