Director of Engineering

About the role

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.

What You’ll Do

• Set the technical direction for our sensing platform across hardware, firmware, software, and field deployment.
• 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.
• Establish the engineering practices (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.
• Ownt engineering delivery against the milestones that our commercial deployments depend on.
• Stay close enough to the work 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 at a company that shipped physical products.
• Experience taking hardware from working prototype to a reliable, deployed product at scale.
• Breadth across the surface this role owns, sensing hardware, firmware and embedded electronics, cloud infrastructure, AI/ML systems, and user-facing software, with real depth in at least one of hardware or software.
• 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.
• 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 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.