Staff Electrical Engineer

The Electric Plant•San Francisco, CA

4d•$225,000 - $245,000•Onsite

About The Position

The Electric Plant Co. is seeking a Staff Electrical Engineer to lead the sensing and signal-acquisition platform for their plant and tree intelligence product. This role involves the full electronic stack, including analog design, embedded systems, sensor validation, and field deployment. The ideal candidate is a generalist capable of managing broad responsibilities, seeking help when needed, and evolving from device development to fleet management and new product versions. The hardware measures electrical signals from living plants and trees, and the engineer will design, validate, and improve the electronics that capture this data. This includes electrode interfaces, analog front ends, embedded firmware, low-power field devices, and the data hand-off to the ML training pipeline. The role also involves building custom lab equipment and research sensors to support the science team's exploration of new signals. As the most experienced electrical engineer, this position will shape the direction of sensing system design, validation, and evolution, collaborating with scientists, ML engineers, operations, and leadership to influence hardware architecture, dataset quality, and platform capabilities.

Requirements

6–12 years of experience developing and shipping electronic products, with a proven history of owning hardware systems end-to-end.
Strong mixed-signal and analog design experience, including instrumentation and precision amplifiers, ADCs, filtering, low-noise design, grounding, decoupling, and sensor interfaces.
Hands-on schematic capture, PCB design, bring-up, and debugging experience.
Technical leadership skills, with the ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams (scientists, ML engineers, operations, leadership) to make informed decisions.
Comfortable setting technical direction in a small company environment with limited process scaffolding.
Embedded systems experience, including shipping IoT projects at scale, proficiency in C/C++ on ESP32/ARM, and understanding of RTOS basics.
A track record of validating sensors against ground truth.
Direct, low-ego communication style.

Nice To Haves

Experience with biosensors, electrophysiology, neural interfaces, bioelectronics, or other low-signal sensing systems (academic or industrial).
Exposure to plant science, such as published research, personal interest, or experience with electrodes on trees.
Knowledge of low-power IoT stacks (LoRaWAN, NB-IoT, LTE-M) and battery-life optimization.
Experience with DSP, digital filtering, or signal processing.
Prior experience at a deep-tech or hardware-software company (e.g., physical AI, IoT, robotics, climate, life sciences).
Prior experience with outdoor or agricultural products, including IP-rated enclosures, environmental robustness, and field-serviceable design.

Responsibilities

Set the electrical architecture for the sensing platform, covering analog front end, embedded systems, power, and field deployments.
Own the mixed-signal front end for plant electrophysiology, including electrode interfaces, instrumentation amplifiers, filtering, ADC chains, and noise-floor characterization against real plant signals.
Design, review, and bring up schematics and PCBAs for the IoT hardware stack, including multi-PCBA designs for analog front end, MCU/main, and power.
Establish validation methods and characterization protocols to ensure signal trustworthiness for the dataset.
Collaborate with science and foundation-model teams to enhance signal quality, evaluate new sensing approaches, and ensure field-captured data is trainable.
Build custom lab and research hardware, such as purpose-built sensors, test rigs, and instrumentation for scientific exploration.
Contribute to embedded firmware development in C/C++ for ESP32 and future low-power LoRa platforms, focusing on hardware bring-up, characterization, deployment, and debugging.
Drive technical decisions impacting hardware performance, dataset quality, reliability, and future sensing capabilities.
Perform hands-on bring-up of new hardware builds using oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and spectrum analyzers.