Director of Engineering

The Electric Plant•San Francisco, CA

6d•Onsite

About The Position

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. 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.

Requirements

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 Haves

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.

Responsibilities

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.