Founding Software Engineer

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.

We are hiring a Founding Software Engineer to own the software platform that turns our foundation model and IoT hardware into a usable product. As an early addition to our growing team, you’ll help define not only what we build, but how we build it.

From cloud infrastructure and APIs to real-time dashboards and firmware integrations, you'll own systems that are both fast to ship and engineered to last. You’ll collaborate daily with our scientists and hardware engineers, influence architectural decisions, and lay down the software foundations that future teams will build upon.

We’re looking for an engineer whose strengths lean toward backend systems, platforms, distributed architectures, infrastructure, and reliability. Front-end work is part of the job, but elegant user interfaces are less important than building robust systems that operate reliably in the real world.

At The Electric Plant, AI-native development is a core part of our engineering culture, and we want you to help our science, operations, and deployment teams build internal tools using AI -augmented workflows. We expect engineers to be fluent with modern AI-assisted development workflows and to use them as a force multiplier for design, implementation, debugging, testing, and operations.

Tech stack: Golang, Postgres, Linux on GCP. React on the frontend. C and MicroPython for firmware. LoRaWAN, MQTT, and other IoT protocols on the edge.

• Build and scale the platform that ingests, processes, and visualizes our IoT data, integrating sensors and AI models.

• Design and evolve cloud architectures that support large-scale, distributed sensor networks.

• Develop and maintain APIs, services, and dashboards for internal teams and external clients.

• Partner closely with scientists, hardware engineers, product, and deployment teams to bring new capabilities into production. In particular, we want you to help the team build internal tools using AI-augmented development workflows, mentoring colleagues in safe, mature use of AI coding tools.

• Own systems end-to-end, from architecture and implementation through deployment, monitoring, reliability, and improving cost efficiency.

• Build observability, reliability, and operational tooling that enables the platform to scale.

• Use AI-assisted development tools as a core part of your workflow to increase engineering leverage and velocity.

• Contribute to technical strategy and roadmap while executing quickly on short-term needs.

   

• 7–10 years of professional software engineering experience, with a demonstrated history of owning production systems end-to-end, regardless of title or years of experience.

• Strong experience building backend systems, APIs, distributed systems, cloud platforms, and infrastructure.

• Experience designing and operating production systems with reliability, scalability, and maintainability in mind.

• Comfort working across the stack when needed, while bringing particular strength in backend and platform engineering.

• Real fluency with AI-augmented development workflows (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or equivalent). Not as a novelty — as how you work and how you'll help others work.

• Maturity about how AI gets used in production: you ship acceleration, not slop.

• Excited by IoT and embedded systems; ideally some exposure to firmware or protocols like MQTT or LoRaWAN.

• Startup velocity and judgment about what to skip — you ship the right version for the moment.

• Direct, low-ego communicator. Honest about what's broken. Comfortable being the one who says "this won't work" or "let's just do it."

   

• Experience building AI-enabled or ML-powered products (not just consuming AI tools, but shipping products with them).

• Prior experience at a deep-tech or hardware-software company — physical AI, IoT, robotics, climate, life sciences.

• Wireless / LoRaWAN experience

   

• Salary: $175,000–$195,000 per year

• Equity: In addition to salary, we offer a meaningful equity package. As an early member of the team, you'll receive a more generous equity grant than is typical at later-stage companies. We're committed to ensuring that early contributors share meaningfully in the company's success.

• 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.