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 Engineer to own the full electronic stack of our IoT hardware — the device that streams biosignals from real plants and trees in the field, and the only data-collection device for our foundation model.

From the electrode interface through the analog front end, ADC chain, embedded firmware, and the hand-off to our ML training pipeline, you own how clean and how trainable the signal is when it reaches our model. Alongside the core IoT product, you'll also build hardware that the rest of the company depends on — custom lab equipment, research sensors, and bench tooling that help our science team probe new signals before they become product features.

Every signal our foundation model learns from flows through what you build. You will set the upper bound on what the model can learn.

Tech stack: C/C++ firmware on ESP32 and low-power LoRa MCUs. Altium or KiCad. LoRaWAN, MQTT, and other IoT protocols on the edge. Python for test automation and characterization tooling.

What you'll do

Design, review, and bring up schematics and PCBAs across the IoT hardware stack — multi-PCBA designs spanning analog front end, MCU/main, and power
Own the mixed-signal front end for plant electrophysiology — electrode interface, instrumentation amps, filtering, ADC chain, and noise floor characterization against real plant signals
Write and maintain embedded firmware in C/C++ on ESP32 today, with low-power LoRa MCU variants on the near roadmap for outdoor and off-grid deployments
Characterize and validate sensors against ground truth — bench protocols, automated test rigs, repeatability studies, in-vivo work alongside our science team
Partner closely with the foundation model team so the raw data captured in the field is actually trainable — you own the link between hardware and dataset quality
Build custom lab and research hardware — purpose-built sensors, test rigs, and instrumentation that help the science team probe new signals before they become product features
Bring up every new build with your own hands — oscilloscope, logic analyzer, and spectrum analyzer fluent

What we're looking for

4+ years shipping embedded hardware products end-to-end — concept through DVT to production. You've debugged your own boards.
Strong C/C++ on ARM Cortex and ESP32, with real fluency in peripherals (SPI/I²C/UART), DMA, and RTOS basics
Hands-on schematic capture and PCBA bring-up in Altium or KiCad
Solid mixed-signal and analog instincts — ADCs, instrumentation and precision amps, low-noise design, grounding and decoupling discipline
A track record of validating sensors against ground truth, not just "the LED blinks"
Comfortable in a 10–30 person startup with limited process scaffolding — you write the protocol you wished existed
Direct, low-ego communicator. Excited to work shoulder-to-shoulder with scientists, ML engineers, and operators.

Nice to have

Biosensors, electrophysiology, neural interfaces, or bioelectronics background — academic or industrial
Plant science exposure — published research, a personal interest, or just having put electrodes on a tree before
Low-power IoT stacks (LoRaWAN, NB-IoT, LTE-M) and battery-life optimization
DSP, digital filtering, or signal-processing chops
Prior outdoor or agricultural product experience — IP-rated enclosures, environmental robustness, field-serviceable design

Compensation & logistics

Comp is competitive for a senior engineer at a Bay Area seed-stage company, with meaningful early-stage equity
Standard benefits
Full-time, permanent, in-person at our Presidio office in San Francisco
Start date: June/July 2026

Hardware Engineer