Hardware Operations Lead (1)

Company: The Electric Plant Co. Job Title: Hardware Operations Lead Type: Full-time, permanent Location: San Francisco, in-person. Periodic Asia and field travel. Compensation: Competitive senior-operator 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 2026.

We think of ourselves as a Physical AI company applied to plants. The closest analogy is what Applied Intuition has been doing for autonomy — the real-world data-acquisition layer is where the work lives. Our IoT hardware is the data-collection device for our foundation model. Every signal the model learns from flows through hardware we build, ship, and put on real trees in real fields. That makes hardware operations one of the most strategically important functions in the company.

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.

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
• Report up and across — weekly ops snapshot, monthly cost-and-yield trend, one-page exec read

What we're looking for

• 5–10 years operating a hardware function. CM management, BOM ownership, supply chain, manufacturing programs. You've shipped real units at meaningful volume.
• 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).