Hardware Operations 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 are hiring a Hardware Operations Lead to own our IoT hardware as a manufactured product — manufacturing partnerships, fulfillment, RMA, supply chain, BOM management, cost-down, unit economics forecasting, and hardware program management across our engineering, contract manufacturing, and field-deployment surfaces. This is our first dedicated hardware operations hire. You'll build the systems, processes, supplier relationships, and operating cadence that become the foundation of the hardware operations function as the company scales. The work in the next eighteen months is real. Contract manufacturer qualification trips to Asia. Cost-down across the BOM as we drive toward target unit economics at volume. LoRa router and gateway matching across customer sites. Box and enclosure assembly. IoT runtime cost management. FCC certification. Next-generation hardware spec coordination. Research sensor procurement. First-line response when something breaks in the field at the hardware layer. You will build the operational processes from scratch. We have ~50 hardware units in the field today. By the end of 2026 we need hundreds; by end of 2027, thousands. The trajectory after that is steeper. You will set the operational foundation that determines whether we get there. What you'll do Own the contract manufacturer relationship — capacity planning, build-schedule coordination, supplier escalations, quality loop closure. Manage the BOM as a single source of truth across revisions; drive line-by-line cost-down; qualify second-sources, especially with Chinese, Taiwanese, and Southeast Asian vendors. Forecast unit economics credibly enough to walk into a board conversation. Run production planning and the PO lifecycle — weekly cadence with the CM, inventory accounted for across incoming / WIP / finished goods / customer-allocated. Run hardware program management across active initiatives — build schedules, FCC certification, the next hardware spec, research sensor procurement, LoRa router and gateway matching, IoT runtime cost. Be the first call when something breaks in the field at the hardware layer; close the loop with engineering and the supplier. Build the operational systems and processes that take us from dozens of deployed units to hundreds and then thousands, without losing visibility, quality, or velocity. Report up and across — weekly ops snapshot, monthly cost-and-yield trend, one-page exec read. What we're looking for You have personally helped scale hardware products from prototype through volume production and understand the operational realities that emerge at each stage. You know what breaks at 50 units, what breaks at 500, and what breaks at 5,000. Deep experience with contract manufacturing, BOM ownership, supply chain management, production planning, and hardware programs. You've shipped real units at meaningful volume and have lived through the transition from engineering builds to repeatable production. Direct working relationships with Asia manufacturing. Chinese, Taiwanese, or Southeast Asian CMs and suppliers — and honest tolerance for the time zones (some 6–8 AM and 7–9 PM windows). Strong operator instincts. You build the cost model, run the forecast, hold a margin discussion with the CEO, and translate operational reality into language a board or Series A lead can act on. Strong program-management discipline. Schedules do not slip on your watch without you being the one who flagged it three weeks ago. Comfortable as the function. Sub-15-person company. No team underneath you on day one. No procedural scaffolding to lean on. You build it. Comfortable living close to the hardware. You don't need to be the electrical engineer, but you understand manufacturing constraints, component tradeoffs, test processes, and field realities well enough to make strong operational decisions. Technically literate. You understand enough about what's on the board to talk credibly with suppliers, the CM, our EE, and our field team. Not a deep technical IC — we have an electrical engineer for that. Direct, low-ego communicator. Comfortable telling an engineer "this isn't manufacturable yet" and a CM "this slipped — what's the path back." Nice to have Prior experience at a hardware startup that scaled from prototype to 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, permanent, in-person at our San Francisco office Periodic Asia travel and field travel Start date: June or July 2026