Director of Engineering

Full-time. In-person at our Presidio office in San Francisco. Start date: ASAP.

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 this year.

The Role

We're hiring a Director of Engineering to lead the engineering function at the core of our product and to build the team behind it. You'll own the hardware, firmware, and software that turn living plant signals into data our foundation model can learn from, and you'll grow a small group of exceptional engineers into an engineering organization.

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 user-facing software that deliver plant intelligence outside the lab. 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 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.

You'll report to the CEO and be the person the company relies on to make sure engineering delivers: a production-ready platform behind our first commercial deployments, and a foundation that scales as we grow.

What you'll do

• Set the technical direction for our sensing platform across hardware, firmware, software, and field deployment.
• 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.
• Establish the engineering practices (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 to make credible architectural calls and earn the trust of staff-level engineers.

What we're looking for

• A track record of building and leading engineering teams at a 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.
• Experience taking hardware from working prototype to a reliable, deployed product at scale.
• Breadth across the surface this role owns, sensing hardware, firmware and embedded electronics, cloud infrastructure, AI/ML systems, and user-facing software, with real depth in at least one of hardware or software.
• 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.
• 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 have

• 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 agricultural product experience.

Compensation & logistics

• Salary range is $280k - $310k per year, with meaningful early-stage equity.
• Standard benefits.
• Full-time, in-person at our Presidio office in San Francisco.
• Start date: ASAP.

We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.