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The Subvocal CompanyTalk to your computer without talkingHead of SensingFull-time · San Francisco, CA, US · $150K - $250K

Salary$150k – $250k
LocationSan Francisco, CA, US
Work modeon-site
Typefull-time
EquityIncluded
Company size11+ people
First seen2w ago
Last seen2d ago
Head of Sensing at The Subvocal Company
Location: San Francisco, CA, US
Type: Full-time
Salary: $150K - $250K
Equity: 0.50% - 2.25%
Experience: 6+ years
Visa: US citizen/visa only
About the role
We are looking for someone to own the question at the center of Subvocal: what can we physically measure from the human body that contains enough information to recover internal articulation?
The broader technical design space includes RF sensing, EMG, EEG, mmWave, and other non-invasive physiological sensing methods. For competitive and IP reasons, we are not publicly disclosing the exact architecture of our current system yet, although we share much more during the interview process.
The signals we care about are extremely subtle. They are affected by anatomy, sensor geometry, device placement, motion, interference, and changes of only a few millimeters. A sensing configuration that looks excellent on one person can fail on another, and a configuration with the highest apparent signal strength is not necessarily the one that contains the most useful information for decoding language.
You will own the sensing system from first principles through a wearable implementation. That includes deciding what measurements matter, designing the experiments that answer those questions, and working closely with ML to evaluate configurations based on actual cross-user decoding performance rather than isolated signal metrics.
Some of the problems you will work on include:
•
Designing and evaluating new sensing geometries, modalities, channels, and frequency configurations.
•
Understanding how anatomy and articulator movement affect the measured signal.
•
Improving signal-to-noise ratio while preserving the information needed to distinguish similar phonemes.
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Building multi-channel systems and determining what genuinely independent information each channel adds.
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Modeling and measuring the interaction between sensors, electronics, mechanical design, and the body.
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Developing calibration and normalization methods that make measurements comparable across people, sessions, and devices.
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Translating a laboratory sensing setup into a compact, low-power wearable.
•
Working with external RF, fabrication, simulation, and regulatory partners where useful.
You might be a great fit if you have deep expertise in:
RF engineering, antennas, radar, electromagnetics, biomedical sensing, applied physics, signal processing, or a related area. We are especially interested in people with a PhD or equivalent research depth who are also extremely hands-on. You should be comfortable moving between simulation, mathematical reasoning, benchtop experiments, custom hardware, and data analysis.
This is not a pure simulation or advisory role. You will spend a lot of time building things, testing them on real people, discovering that reality does not match the model, and deciding what experiment to run next. You will also help build the sensing team around you and shape the fundamental architecture of the product.
This is a full-time, in-person role in San Francisco.
About The Subvocal Company
The Subvocal Company (YC F26) is building a wearable that lets you communicate with computers without speaking out loud.
Our goal is to turn deliberate subvocal speech, words you form internally without producing an audible voice or overt movement, into text and commands. Imagine writing an email, coding, searching the web, or talking to an AI at the speed of speech while sitting in a quiet office, on a train, or in the middle of a meeting, without anyone around you hearing a word or seeing you do anything.
Making this work requires solving an unusually difficult sensing and machine learning problem. The broader technical design space includes RF sensing, EMG, EEG, mmWave, and other non-invasive physiological sensing methods. For competitive and IP reasons, we are not publicly disclosing the exact architecture of our current system yet. What we can say is that we have already built prototypes that decode continuous subvocal speech at 200+ words per minute with high accuracy from real physiological signals, and we are now turning that research into a portable device that can work across people after a short calibration.
We are a small team in San Francisco, backed by Y Combinator and Afore Capital, along with some incredible angels. We move extremely quickly, build most things from first principles, and work across sensing, machine learning, embedded systems, hardware, and product design. The people joining now will not be optimizing a mature product or working on one narrow subsystem. They will help make foundational technical decisions, own entire areas of the company, and shape what this interface ultimately becomes.
We think silent speech will become a new fundamental way humans interact with computers. If working on something that still sounds slightly like science fiction, but is rapidly becoming a real engineering problem, sounds exciting to you, we would love to hear from you.
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