Team & Careers — Build Airless Mobility in LA

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Team · Chapter 04

Reinvent the wheel^® with us.

SMART is a small team of tire, aerospace, and advanced-materials people, prototyping airless mobility from a lab in Los Angeles. The next chapter is the engineers who take it to the world - and a few seats are still open.

SMART Tire astronaut on the California coast, pointing to the horizon

Why it matters

Aim higher than a tire.

SMART is a NASA-born technology rebuilding the wheel for the next century - on Earth and beyond. If that's the scale you want to work at, you're in the right place.

How we think

We're not fixing the flat tire. We're replacing the whole system.

For a century, the tire has meant the same things: flats, treadwear, replacements, spares, waste, and constant maintenance. The world accepted it as normal.

We didn't. So we went back to first principles and rebuilt the wheel from the material up.

Tires are only the beginning. The same first-principles philosophy - and the platform beneath it - will keep growing into everything that rolls, carries, and moves.

A SMART Tire team member in a SMART astronaut tee looking up at a SpaceX Falcon 9, across the street from the new LA headquarters

New HQ · Los Angeles · 2026

Across the street from SpaceX.

SMART spent a few years in Akron, Ohio, the historic tire capital of the world, maturing NASA-born technology into a commercial platform and building deep materials and tire-industry expertise. Now we're bringing that knowledge to Los Angeles, one of the fastest-growing deep tech and aerospace ecosystems in the world, where it lets us move even faster. We're hiring a core team of local engineers to take it to market.

Our new HQ sits in LA's aerospace corridor, with a materials lab, fabrication floor, and durability test rigs, close to the partners and test facilities the work depends on. Bench work runs alongside AI-driven digital twins that let us explore far more designs than we could ever build, using a patent-pending design and analysis method.

On the world stage

The SMART Tire team presenting the $300B tire-industry opportunity to a full audience in China

SMART Tire team presenting the opportunity · China

Leadership

Built at the intersection of aerospace, mobility, and advanced materials.

Founded by operators from the tire industry, aerospace, automotive, and advanced-materials research - the technology is built on exclusive and commercial NASA licenses and SMART Tire’s own granted patents.

Earl Cole

Founder & CEO

Brian Yennie

Founder & CTO

Why join now

Join our next phase. Own the hardest parts.

We're looking for smart, hardworking engineers and problem solvers, from rising talent to seasoned veterans, with the skills, ingenuity, creativity and tenacity to do big things. They relish the complex and the difficult, and they grin at solving the problems most people call impossible. The reward is the work of a pioneer: being first to build what the world has never seen. We work hard, we laugh a lot, and we celebrate every breakthrough together.

REAL IMPACT

Your work is the product

You'll work on the core technology - not a ticket in someone else's backlog. What you build ships.

GENUINELY UNSOLVED

Problems no one has cracked

This isn't optimization work. You'll take on materials and structural challenges on a NASA-born platform.

IT REACHES THE ROAD

From bench to launch pad

From an LA lab to real vehicles, fleets, and space - your work ends up on the road, not in a deck.

BUILT BY HAND

Design it, machine it, break it

Our engineers don't hand drawings over a wall. You'll be in the lab with your hands on the hardware you designed.

GROUND FLOOR

Get in early

Join before the world catches on. Early team members shape the company, the culture, and their own role as we grow.

WORK HARD, HAVE FUN

Serious work, good people

A dynamic, positive, optimistic team that invests in your growth, backs your boldest ideas, and shares every win.

From lunar rovers to city streets, fleets, and robots, our work makes mobility safer, more reliable, and more sustainable, on Earth and beyond.

SMART airless tire mounted in a custom durability test rig

Access to top-tier aerospace and mobility projects and advanced materials

Open disciplines

We're assembling our LA engineering team.

Materials & metallurgy

Shape memory alloys, fatigue, and the science behind a tire that never goes flat.

Structural & mechanical

Load-bearing architecture, simulation, and design of the airless structure.

Test & validation

Proving durability and performance from the lab bench to the open road.

Careers · Hiring now Director of Product Development & Manufacturing Los Angeles · On-site +

Los Angeles · On-site

With deliveries on schedule for 2027, we’re adding a hands-on leader to our core engineering team to own our first products from final prototype to production: pilot units for a leading micromobility operator, and our first bicycle tire for customers on our waitlist. You’ll engineer with superelastic shape-memory alloys, a material few engineers have ever designed for production, and contribute to our ongoing aerospace programs. Ideal candidates have taken physical products from concept to market, with deep experience in product development, manufacturing, and supplier management.

Interested? Send us a message for the full job description. careers@smarttire.com →

Don't see your exact title? If you're exceptional and drawn to mechanical problems others walk away from, reach out anyway - we hire for ability, not a job description.

Careers