Head of Operations

Human Archive is a research lab backed by Y Combinator focused on modeling human embodied intelligence.

Humans are the most sophisticated biological systems we have ever observed, yet we still do not fully understand ourselves. Research into human physical intelligence — including the human hand, proprioception, and vision — remains largely unsolved. Our mission is to recover human embodied intelligence as a learned model. To achieve this, we build custom hardware products, deploy them globally at scale, and publish research. Today, our data is used for robotics and world modeling, but the broader opportunity is advancing scientific research into intelligence itself.

Founded by Stanford and UC Berkeley researchers, we are lean, deeply technical, and operate at extreme speed, taking on unglamorous and conventionally impossible problems that directly unlock step-function gains in model capability.

The deployment of capable humanoids at scale will permanently redefine human labor. Undesirable physical work will disappear, and human effort will shift toward a new era of abundant creativity.

We are building the infrastructure to accelerate that transition by assembling the Human Archive mafia. You will own meaningful systems from day one and see your work directly impact model capabilities. This is a once-in-a-generation inflection point. If you want to help reshape physical labor and work on problems that matter at civilizational scale, join us.

The most important operational role on the hardware program. You live in Shenzhen, walk the factory floor, and own the ODM relationship and the component supply.

What you'll work on

ODM relationship and program management

• Day-to-day relationship with our manufacturing partner

• SOW, milestone schedule, and deliverable tracking

• On-site issue resolution at the factory

• Contract negotiations and quarterly reviews

Component sourcing

• Allocations for critical components (industrial image sensors, IMUs, MEMS sensors, lenses, Li-ion cells)

• Pricing, lead times, MOQs across the Chinese supply chain

• Backup supplier lists for every critical part

• Long-lead component buffer management

Factory operations

• In-person factory visits, line audits, first-article inspections, NPI runs

• Floor QA and incoming material inspection

• Yield improvement and corrective action plans

• Translation between English-speaking engineering and Mandarin-speaking factory teams

DFM and manufacturing liaison

• DFM reviews between our engineering team and the ODM's process engineers

• Test fixture and assembly line design

• Real-time production blocker resolution

Commercial and compliance

• Contracts, NDAs, IP protection arrangements with Chinese partners

• BOM cost tracking and cost-down sweeps

• FCC, CE, RoHS, REACH documentation

Required experience

• Mandarin-native plus business-fluent English

• Resident in Shenzhen or willing to relocate

• 5+ years in hardware supply chain or ODM management roles in China

• Deep working network across the Chinese consumer electronics supply chain

• Comfortable on factory floors and in vendor meetings, not just on email

Strong plus

• Background at a hardware company building head-worn, body-worn, or consumer camera products (DJI, Insta360, GoPro, Meta, Anker, Goertek, etc.)

• Sony industrial sensor allocation experience

• Prior relationships at Tier-1 Chinese ODMs

• Scaling hardware from <100 to 10,000+ units/year

About this role You're our senior presence in China from day one. Supply chain runs on trust and proximity. Fly to factories, walk lines, negotiate over dinner. If that sounds tedious, you'll hate it. If it sounds like the job, you'll have more autonomy than most VPs.