Founding Design Engineer

Orchard's Founding Design Engineer

Orchard is building an entirely new way for farmers to understand and operate their farms. Our product turns data about millions of plants into decisions that feel clear and intuitive. At the same time, every customer touchpoint (software platform, marketing material, slide deck, merchandise, or factory) should communicate the quality and ambition of our company behind it.

As Orchard's Founding Design Engineer, you will establish the design function and own design across product, brand, marketing, software engineering, hardware, and our physical environments. You will work directly with our CEO and leaders across the company to move from ambiguous problems to finished artifacts. This is intentionally a broad role for an exceptional generalist.

What You'll Own

• Build and evolve Orchard's design system.

• End-to-end product design for our FruitScope OS software platform, from customer research through prototypes, visual design, and iteration.

• Own our brand design across our website, sales materials, customer stories, presentations, and company communications.

• Design marketing materials like tradeshow booths, conference materials, field-day experiences, and product packaging.

• Support our Hardware team with industrial-design thinking, labeling, documentation, and operator experiences.

• Raise the company-wide quality bar through templates, feedback, and design principles.

• Help define the future design organization as we grow.

What We Look For

• You sit at the intersection of art and technology, with between 1-5 years of real-world design experience.

• A portfolio demonstrating exceptional taste, product thinking and visual craft.

• The range and appetite to work across designing product, software, brand, marketing, physical experiences, etc.

• Experience taking ambiguous zero-to-one projects from research through polished, shipped work.

• Fluency in Figma and modern prototyping tools.

• Comfortable using Claude Code and other AI tools to bring your designs to life.

• A low-ego, highly iterative working style and willingness to execute details personally.

• You like to move fast.

About the Opportunity

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage with 100% of employee premiums covered.

• The opportunity to lead design and establish the design function at a rapidly growing, category-defining company.

• We move fast, and sometimes this means staying late or working weekends

• Our team is close-knit & highly driven, you'll work directly with leadership and collaborate across all our teams

• We're deeply motivated by the impact we're making – every system designed and built means less food that goes to waste, and more people who are fed