Hardware Operations Manager
About The Electric Plant Co.
The Electric Plant Co. is building a new category of plant and tree intelligence. Our IoT hardware measures the hidden electrical signals in plants and trees, paired with environmental data, and our foundation model decodes those signals into real-time insights about plant health, growth, and stress. We're a small, fast-moving company in San Francisco working at the intersection of biology, hardware, AI, and IoT. We closed our seed round in November 2025 and our first commercial deployment launches in August.
The Role
We are hiring a Hardware Operations Manager to help scale the operational systems behind our IoT hardware. You'll work across manufacturing, supply chain, inventory, production planning, hardware logistics, and cross-functional hardware programs to ensure our devices move smoothly from engineering builds to customer deployments.
Working closely with our engineering team, contract manufacturers, suppliers, and deployment team, you'll coordinate production, resolve operational issues, improve processes, and help keep hardware programs on track as we grow.
We have approximately 50 hardware units in the field today. By the end of 2026 we expect to have hundreds, and by the end of 2027, thousands. As we scale, you'll play a key role in helping our hardware operations evolve alongside the business.
The work over the next eighteen months is hands-on and varied. You'll help coordinate contract manufacturing builds, manage inventory and supplier communication, support BOM revisions and component sourcing, coordinate research hardware procurement, assist with certification and production readiness activities, support field hardware logistics and returns, and work with engineering to resolve issues that arise once hardware is deployed. Along the way, you'll identify opportunities to improve the systems and processes that help us scale efficiently while maintaining quality and reliability.
What you'll do
Coordinate production schedules with contract manufacturers and suppliers.
Track purchase orders, inventory, and hardware availability across prototype and production builds.
Monitor hardware quality issues and help coordinate resolution between engineering, deployment, and manufacturing partners.
Support supplier management activities, including lead-time tracking, component availability, and alternate sourcing efforts.
Maintain BOMs, manufacturing documentation, and operational records across hardware revisions.
Coordinate logistics for hardware shipments, field deployments, returns, and RMAs.
Track key operational metrics and prepare regular reporting on production status, inventory, and supplier performance.
Identify opportunities to improve operational workflows and help implement process improvements as the company grows.
What we're looking for
Experience supporting hardware products from engineering builds through production. You've worked on real hardware products and understand the operational realities of manufacturing, shipping, and supporting physical devices. You've collaborated with engineering, suppliers, and contract manufacturers to keep hardware programs moving.
Strong hardware operations fundamentals. You have experience with contract manufacturing, supply chain coordination, BOM management, inventory, production planning, or hardware program management. You understand how these functions come together to deliver hardware successfully.
Comfort working with global manufacturing partners. You've worked with contract manufacturers or suppliers, ideally in Asia, and are comfortable collaborating across time zones when needed.
Organized, reliable operator. You create visibility into what's happening, keep projects on track, and proactively identify risks before they become surprises. You communicate status clearly and follow through on commitments.
Strong cross-functional project management skills. You can coordinate work across engineering, manufacturing, deployment, and external partners, balancing competing priorities while keeping stakeholders aligned on timelines, risks, and next steps.
Comfortable in an early-stage startup. You enjoy working in an environment where priorities evolve quickly, processes are still developing, and everyone contributes outside of a narrowly defined job description. You're excited to improve existing systems as the company grows.
Technically curious. You don't need to design the electronics yourself, but you understand enough about hardware systems, manufacturing processes, testing, and component tradeoffs to make sound operational decisions and communicate effectively with engineers and suppliers.
Process improvement mindset. You naturally look for ways to make operations more efficient, reliable, and scalable. You've helped improve workflows, documentation, reporting, or operational processes that made a team more effective.
Direct, collaborative communicator. You communicate clearly and respectfully with engineers, suppliers, and teammates. You're comfortable raising concerns early, asking thoughtful questions, and working through operational challenges without creating unnecessary drama.
Nice to have
Prior experience at a hardware startup that scaled into large volume production (IoT, robotics, autonomy, climate hardware, medical devices)
Low-power IoT product programs — LoRaWAN, LTE-M, NB-IoT, battery-powered field devices
Mandarin or another regionally relevant language
Outdoor or agricultural product experience — IP-rated enclosures, environmental robustness
Compensation & logistics
The salary range for this role is $140k-$167k annually, with meaningful early-stage equity
Standard benefits
Full-time, in-person at our San Francisco office
Periodic Asia travel and field travel
Start date: ASAP
We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.
Deployment Lead
About The Electric Plant Co.
The Electric Plant Co. is building a new category of plant and tree intelligence. Our IoT hardware measures the hidden electrical signals in plants and trees, paired with environmental data, and our foundation model decodes those signals into real-time insights about plant health, growth, and stress. We're a small, fast-moving company in San Francisco working at the intersection of biology, hardware, AI, and IoT. We closed our seed round in November 2025 and our first commercial deployment launches in August.
The Role
We're hiring our first Deployment Lead to shape early pilots and scale to real, repeatable deployments: standing up our first customer deployments, owning the relationship with the customer's leadership, translating plant intelligence into business value, and helping develop the playbook that scales us from the first deployments to thousands and then millions of connected plants. Our go-to-market is forward-deployed, embedding alongside our customers to co-build the working solution in the field.
The ideal person has founded or helped build an AgTech company and has personally deployed technology with real agricultural customers. You'll work directly with our CEO on the first deployments and have a genuine hand in shaping how this entire motion gets built.
Our Deployment Lead will be based out of our San Francisco HQ, but there will be significant travel.
If you're entrepreneurial, fluent in both the agriculture and the business, and energized by making powerful-but-early technology actually work in the field, this role is in the sweet spot.
What you’ll do
Own our first customer deployments from kickoff through value realization. This isn't a simple handoff from sales. You're the person responsible for making the deployment work in the field and for the customer.
Build trusted relationships with customer leadership, especially CEOs, owners, presidents, and operators running large agricultural businesses.
Translate plant intelligence into business value: irrigation decisions, operating changes, ROI, expansion opportunities, and the concrete outcomes the customer will actually act on.
Orchestrate the deployment team across field engineering, agronomy, customer operations, and product; make sure the work flows as one system instead of separate functions.
Work shoulder-to-shoulder with our CEO on the first deployments, then help turn that founder-led motion into a repeatable deployment playbook.
Be the customer-facing power user of Foundry, our software platform, and a key source of feedback as the engineering evolves our toolkit.
Help define what a successful deployment looks like: what gets installed, what gets measured, what gets validated, what gets reported, and what earns the customer's trust.
Turn messy field learning into repeatable process: checklists, SOPs, customer rhythms, internal feedback loops, and deployment practices that make the next deployment faster and better.
Look opportunistically for where the system can deliver more value: new use cases, new insights, new sites, new workflows, and new ways the model can improve through deployment.
Support the development of deployment processes, tools, and operating practices that make future deployments more effective.
What we’re looking for
You have personally deployed a technical product with real agricultural customers. Not just sold it, not just supported it from a distance — you have made early technology work in the field.
Agriculture or horticulture business fluency. You do not need to be a scientist; we have agronomy and science expertise for that. But you need to be credible with an owner or operator and understand how agricultural businesses make decisions.
Entrepreneurial, build-from-scratch instincts. You are comfortable with ambiguity, unfinished systems, biological variability, and customers who need value before the playbook exists.
Strong commercial judgment. You can own an executive customer relationship, work with the CEO to structure a pilot, and understand what matters economically.
Trust-builder. You can be honest about what's proven, what's still being learned, and what we need to do next without losing the customer's confidence.
Operationally obsessive. Checklists, follow-up, ownership, meeting notes, action items, SOPs, internal handoffs. You treat process as leverage, not bureaucracy.
Technically literate across hardware, connectivity, data, and software. You do not need to be the person debugging the device or writing the software, but you need to understand enough to coordinate the work and ask the right questions.
Comfortable joining an early deployment effort where many of the processes, tools, and best practices are still being developed.
Low-ego and high-agency. Early deployments break. You are happy to co-pilot with the founder at first, learn quickly, and gain more autonomy as the motion becomes real.
Comfort with significant field travel and working directly with customers outside a traditional office environment.
The bullseye candidate has been an early operator in AgTech and has sold, deployed, supported, and iterated a technical product with agricultural customers. Adjacent profiles can work if you have real ag-customer exposure and have operated close to the field.
Nice to have
Hardware, IoT, sensor, or connected-device deployment experience.
Precision agriculture, irrigation technology, orchard / specialty-crop technology, controlled-environment agriculture, or environmental monitoring experience.
Prior forward-deployed, field applications, solutions engineering, pilot-program, or technical implementation experience.
Experience turning early customer deployments into repeatable playbooks.
Data fluency: metadata, labeling, signal quality, ground truth, or the realities of building useful datasets from messy field environments.
Experience at an early-stage AgTech, climate tech, robotics, IoT, or hardware-software company.
Compensation & Logistics
Salary range is $150k-$170k per year, with meaningful early-stage equity
Standard benefits
Full-time
San Francisco-based, but work location varies due to significant field travel (often seasonal) and potential for semi-permanent anchoring near customers
Start date: ASAP
We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.
Director of Engineering
Full-time. In-person at our Presidio office in San Francisco. Start date: ASAP.
About The Electric Plant Co.
The Electric Plant Co. is building a new category of plant and tree intelligence. Our IoT hardware measures the hidden electrical signals in plants and trees, paired with environmental data, and our foundation model decodes those signals into real-time insights about plant health, growth, and stress. We’re a small, fast-moving company in San Francisco working at the intersection of biology, hardware, AI, and IoT. We closed our seed round in November 2025 and our first commercial deployment launches this year.
The Role
We're hiring a Director of Engineering to own the systems architecture behind our product and to build the team behind it. This is a strategic role, not just an execution one: you'll decide how sensing hardware, firmware, cloud infrastructure, and software fit together as one coherent system, and you'll bring product judgment to those calls, not just technical correctness.
Engineering at Electric Plant turns scientific discoveries into reliable systems that operate at scale: the sensing hardware, firmware, embedded electronics, cloud infrastructure, AI/ML systems, and production-grade software that deliver plant intelligence outside the lab. Engineering also supports hardware and infrastructure in the lab that can advance our research.
This is a hands-on leadership role at a company that is simultaneously a hardware company, a software company, and a deep-tech research company. You'll set technical direction and system architecture across that whole surface, lead the engineers who own it, hire the ones we don't have yet, and partner closely with our science and AI teams to turn novel sensing science into reliable, deployable product. We need someone equally credible reasoning about firmware and embedded constraints as about the UX and reliability of the software our customers actually touch.
You'll report to the CEO and be the person the company relies on to make sure engineering delivers: a coherent system architecture and a production-ready platform behind our first commercial deployments, and a foundation that scales as we grow.
What you’ll do
Own the system architecture: work with your team to determine how sensing hardware, firmware, cloud infrastructure, AI/ML systems, and software fit together, and make the tradeoffs that keep that system coherent as it grows.
Set the technical direction for our sensing platform across hardware, firmware, software, and field deployment.
Bring product thinking to engineering: understand what our field deployments and customers actually need, and use that to shape scope and sequencing of technical development.
Build the engineering team: hire strong engineers, develop the ones we have, and shape the structure and culture.
Lead the transition from working prototypes to reliable, manufacturable, field-deployed product, on both the software and hardware sides.
Establish the engineering practices (documentation as an engineering practice, design review, validation, release, field support) that make quality repeatable at our size.
Partner with the science and AI teams so the hardware we build improves the data our models learn from.
Own engineering delivery against the milestones that our commercial deployments depend on.
Stay close enough to the work, hardware and software alike, to make credible architectural calls and earn the trust of staff-level engineers.
What we’re looking for
A track record of building and leading engineering teams, including at least one company that shipped physical products. We care more about what you've built and the teams you've grown than a specific number of years.
Demonstrated ownership of systems architecture: you can reason about how hardware, firmware, cloud, and software fit together as one system and make design decisions that hold up as a product scales.
Product thinking: a history of shaping what gets built, not just how, informed by real customer and deployment constraints.
Experience taking hardware from working prototype to a reliable, deployed product at scale.
Genuine breadth and balance across the surface this role owns: sensing hardware, firmware and embedded electronics, cloud infrastructure, AI/ML systems, and user-facing software.
We're looking for real experience with systems that include hardware and software , including production-level software experience and a working sense of UX, not just backend or embedded depth with software as an afterthought.
Strong hiring instincts and a history of building teams and culture from a small base.
Technical leadership across disciplines: you can lead alongside scientists, ML engineers, operations, and a founder CEO and balance technical reality with company goals.
Comfort setting direction in a small company with limited process scaffolding. You help establish how things get done with a bias towards building lightweight systems that scale with the company.
Experience with field-deployed or IoT products, where reliability, connectivity, and environmental robustness matter.
A direct, low-ego communicator who can say "the data isn't good enough yet," "this won't scale," or "we should simplify this," and make people better in the process.
Nice to have
Plant science, agriculture, biosensing, electrophysiology, or other low-signal sensing exposure, academic or industrial.
Prior experience at a deep-tech or hardware-software company: physical AI, IoT, robotics, climate, or life sciences.
Experience building the first engineering practices and team at a seed-stage company.
Low-power IoT stacks, DSP or signal processing, or outdoor and and agricultural product experience.
Compensation & logistics
Salary range is $280k - $310k per year, with meaningful early-stage equity.
Standard benefits.
Full-time, in-person at our Presidio office in San Francisco.
Start date: ASAP.
We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.
Founding Software Engineer
About The Electric Plant Co.
The Electric Plant Co. is building a new category of plant and tree intelligence. Our IoT hardware measures the hidden electrical signals in plants and trees, paired with environmental data, and our foundation model decodes those signals into real-time insights about plant health, growth, and stress. We're a small, fast-moving company in San Francisco working at the intersection of biology, hardware, AI, and IoT. We closed our seed round in November 2025 and our first commercial deployment launches in August.
The Role
We are hiring a Founding Software Engineer to own the software platform that turns our foundation model and IoT hardware into a usable product. As an early addition to our growing team, you’ll help define not only what we build, but how we build it.
From cloud infrastructure and APIs to real-time dashboards and firmware integrations, you'll own systems that are both fast to ship and engineered to last. You’ll collaborate daily with our scientists and hardware engineers, influence architectural decisions, and lay down the software foundations that future teams will build upon.
We’re looking for an engineer whose strengths lean toward backend systems, platforms, distributed architectures, infrastructure, and reliability. Front-end work is part of the job, but elegant user interfaces are less important than building robust systems that operate reliably in the real world.
At The Electric Plant, AI-native development is a core part of our engineering culture, and we want you to help our science, operations, and deployment teams build internal tools using AI -augmented workflows. We expect engineers to be fluent with modern AI-assisted development workflows and to use them as a force multiplier for design, implementation, debugging, testing, and operations.
Tech stack: Golang, Postgres, Linux on GCP. React on the frontend. C and MicroPython for firmware. LoRaWAN, MQTT, and other IoT protocols on the edge.
What you'll do
Build and scale the platform that ingests, processes, and visualizes our IoT data, integrating sensors and AI models.
Design and evolve cloud architectures that support large-scale, distributed sensor networks.
Develop and maintain APIs, services, and dashboards for internal teams and external clients.
Partner closely with scientists, hardware engineers, product, and deployment teams to bring new capabilities into production. In particular, we want you to help the team build internal tools using AI-augmented development workflows, mentoring colleagues in safe, mature use of AI coding tools.
Own systems end-to-end, from architecture and implementation through deployment, monitoring, reliability, and improving cost efficiency.
Build observability, reliability, and operational tooling that enables the platform to scale.
Use AI-assisted development tools as a core part of your workflow to increase engineering leverage and velocity.
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Contribute to technical strategy and roadmap while executing quickly on short-term needs.
What we're looking for
7–10 years of professional software engineering experience, with a demonstrated history of owning production systems end-to-end, regardless of title or years of experience.
Strong experience building backend systems, APIs, distributed systems, cloud platforms, and infrastructure.
Experience designing and operating production systems with reliability, scalability, and maintainability in mind.
Comfort working across the stack when needed, while bringing particular strength in backend and platform engineering.
Real fluency with AI-augmented development workflows (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or equivalent). Not as a novelty — as how you work and how you'll help others work.
Maturity about how AI gets used in production: you ship acceleration, not slop.
Excited by IoT and embedded systems; ideally some exposure to firmware or protocols like MQTT or LoRaWAN.
Startup velocity and judgment about what to skip — you ship the right version for the moment.
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Direct, low-ego communicator. Honest about what's broken. Comfortable being the one who says "this won't work" or "let's just do it."
Nice to have
Experience building AI-enabled or ML-powered products (not just consuming AI tools, but shipping products with them).
Prior experience at a deep-tech or hardware-software company — physical AI, IoT, robotics, climate, life sciences.
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Wireless / LoRaWAN experience
Compensation & logistics
Salary: $175,000–$195,000 per year
Equity: In addition to salary, we offer a meaningful equity package. As an early member of the team, you'll receive a more generous equity grant than is typical at later-stage companies. We're committed to ensuring that early contributors share meaningfully in the company's success.
Standard benefits
Full-time, in-person at our Presidio office in San Francisco
Start date: ASAP
We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.
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