John Unkovic

Head of Hardware at Agtonomy

San Francisco, California, United States

About

I'm a technical leader, with a hardware engineering background, who loves designing and building all kinds of physical products. I've built a wide variety of products from consumer electronics to industrial and medical equipment. Seeing projects from concept all the way through mass production to field support and maintenance. With a systems engineering background, I love designing products first with the end-user in mind then with an eye to efficiency and low cost of manufacturing. There is no point in designing products that can't be built. I have experience setting up global supply chains (particularly in Asia), working with contract manufacturers and building internal manufacturing infrastructure and teams. I've also built processes and led teams to maintain equipment after it's been deployed, a really important part of a product's life cycle that is sometimes overlooked.

Experience

  • Head of Hardware at Agtonomy
    Jan 2026 - Present · 6 mos

  • Head of Hardware at Chef Robotics
    Aug 2022 - Jan 2026 · 3 yrs 6 mos

  • Head of Hardware at Third Wave Automation
    Aug 2020 - Aug 2022 · 2 yrs 1 mo

  • Head of Hardware at Stockwell AI Inc.
    May 2017 - Jul 2020 · 3 yrs 3 mos

    I grew the hardware team from zero to 30 team members responsible for hardware design, engineering, manufacturing, and field maintenance. We have: developed a novel system for computer vision-based automated retail, set up a global supply chain and logistics network to produce units at a low cost, built a manufacturing line in the Bay Area to do final assembly and testing, deployed over 1200 systems (and counting) in multiple metro areas in the US, and maintained high uptime through a nationwide service and repair team.

  • Founder at Electricks
    Apr 2016 - Jul 2020 · 4 yrs 4 mos

    Ran a successful Kickstarter for the Trickstick, a fun LED-based light painting tool. My partner and I designed every part of the product, down to the packaging, sourced parts globally and set up manufacturing locally.