Google Looks For Hardware Engineering Wearables Exec

While wearables based on Google’s Wear OS are designed by other companies, that could someday change: The tech company is apparently looking for a vice president of hardware engineering, wearables, VentureBeat reported.

The company is reportedly on the lookout for an executive to head up the growth of an “entire Wearables portfolio” that encompasses “devices addressing a broad spectrum of uses, features, and price points.” It is also seeking someone with experience delivering “products that ship in the hundreds of millions of units.” In addition, the company is also said to be looking for a design manager for consumer wearables. The jobs are said to located at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.

As it stands, Google offers a wireless earbud product called Pixel Buds. Google also has the Google Glass Enterprise Edition wearable. For that product, the company doesn’t manufacturer the hardware for the watch. But it recently acquired assets from Fossil, a watch maker. That development caused “some speculation that Google was buying an entire watch development team,” according to the outlet.

The news comes almost a year after Google said was rolling out a “wearables operating system for everyone” for users of both Android and iPhone devices. In a March blog post, Wear OS by Google Director of Product Management Dennis Troper wrote that the company was “just scratching the surface of what’s possible with wearables and there’s even more exciting work ahead.”

As of 2017, Troper noted, one out of three new Android Wear watch owners also used an iPhone, which prompted the tech company to launch Wear OS by Google. At the time of the report, it was revealed that the worldwide wearables market hit new highs in 2017. During the year total wearable device shipments reached 115.4 million units, which marked a 10.3 percent in from the previous year.