Director of Product Engineering

About Peltier

Peltier Technology designs, engineers, and manufactures modular refrigerators and freezers built on solid-state cooling. Every unit ships with connectivity, IoT, and onboard sensors that track temperature, inventory, and system health. Our customers count on cold that doesn't fail: grocery and retail chains, pharma companies, medical distributors, lab and diagnostics companies. We're at the point where our engineering needs an owner. This is that role. Strong preference for candidates near either our offices (San Francisco, or RTP, NC)

The Role

You'll be our first full-time engineer and the person who owns how Peltier products get designed, made, and certified. Today the work runs through contract product engineers and a contract sourcing-and-manufacturing team in China, plus one qualified contract manufacturer (CM) in Thailand, with more CM partners coming across Asia. You'll lead that engineering team, become the single point of contact between engineering and the manufacturing side, and decide over time what we keep on contract versus bring in-house.

This is a hands-on leadership job, not a pure manager seat. You should be comfortable in a CAD model and a tolerance stack-up, and just as comfortable running a design review with a CM's quality team.

What You'll Do

Lead the product engineering team

• Manage and direct Peltier's contract product engineers who are already running active projects: set priorities, review designs, and own technical decisions.

• Hold the line on quality, schedule, and cost across the product portfolio.

• Bring rigor to how we work: design reviews, version control, documentation, and a bill of materials people can trust.

Own the bridge to sourcing and manufacturing in Asia

• Be the single interface between product engineering and our contract sourcing/manufacturing team in China and our CM partners.

• Translate designs into something a factory can actually build: manage handoffs, engineering changes, and the back-and-forth that keeps a program moving.

• Help qualify and onboard new CM partners across Asia: audits, first-article and PPAP, tooling, capacity, and quality systems.

• Keep our Thailand CM running smoothly today while we add more, without letting quality drift as we scale suppliers.

Drive manufacturability and certification

• Own design-for-manufacturability and design-for-assembly: catch the cost and yield problems before they reach the line.

• Own the certification roadmap across our markets: product safety (UL / IEC 60335 / IEC 62368), EMC and radio (FCC, CE), food contact (NSF) for grocery and retail, and the medical/pharma path (FDA cold-chain expectations, cGMP awareness, and IEC 60601 where it applies).

• Manage test labs and certification bodies, and keep compliance documentation audit-ready.

Decide what we do in-house

• Over time, recommend and lead any in-housing of engineering, but only where it makes sense strategically or financially. The default isn't "insource everything"; it's the right call for cost, speed, and control.

• Make the build-vs-buy case with real numbers, and hire the first in-house engineers when the timing is right.

Build the function

• Stand up the engineering practices, tooling, and team structure a growing hardware company needs. You're laying the foundation, not inheriting one.

What You Bring

Required

•

Mechanical or systems engineering depth.

8\+ years designing and shipping physical products, with real ownership of mechanical/thermal/systems design. A degree in mechanical, mechatronics, or systems engineering, or equivalent experience.

•

Connected hardware

: You have worked alongside electrical, firmware, and IoT/sensor engineers.

•

Hardware that actually shipped.

You've taken products from prototype through volume manufacturing and know what NPI, ramp, and yield problems really look like.

•

Contract manufacturing fluency.

Hands-on experience working with CMs and suppliers in Asia: DFM, first-article/PPAP, tooling, audits, and managing quality at a distance.

•

Certification know-how.

You've shepherded products through safety, EMC, and market-entry certification, and can build a roadmap for new markets.

•

Leadership without a big team.

You can direct contractors and partners you don't formally manage, and influence through clarity rather than headcount.

•

Remote discipline.

You run programs across time zones, communicate in writing by default, and don't need a room to get alignment.

Strongly preferred

• Refrigeration, HVAC, thermal systems, or thermoelectric/Peltier experience.

• Connected hardware: comfort working alongside electrical, firmware, and IoT/sensor engineers even if that's not your core.

• Regulated cold chain (pharma, medical, or lab) and the documentation discipline that comes with it.

• Mandarin or other Asia-region language ability, useful for the China sourcing relationship.

What Success Looks Like (First 6–12 Months)

• You've taken full ownership of the product engineering team and the active projects, and nothing is dropping between engineering and the factory.

• The Thailand CM relationship is running clean, and at least one new CM partner is qualified and producing.

• There's a clear certification roadmap for our current and next markets, with no surprises blocking a launch.

• You've put a build-vs-buy recommendation in front of the CEO on where, if anywhere, to bring engineering in-house, backed by numbers.

How to Apply

Send a short note on a hardware product you took from design to volume — what broke, and how you fixed it — to [email protected] along with a cover letter. The salary range for this role is $150,000–$225,000, depending on experience and qualifications. In addition to base pay, we offer equity package, a 401(k) with company match, and a full benefits package including health, dental, and vision coverage.