Company: The Electric Plant Co.

Job Title: Hardware Engineer (EE + Firmware)

Type: Full-time, permanent

Location: San Francisco / Bay Area; in-person

Compensation: Competitive senior-engineer base + meaningful early-stage equity. Standard benefits.

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