Founding Design Engineer

Orchard Robotics; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision coverage

Lead design function

Fast-paced environment

Close-knit team

High impact

Job summary

Orchard Robotics seeks a Founding Design Engineer to establish the design function across product, brand, marketing, software, hardware, and our physical environments. You will work directly with our CEO and leaders to move from ambiguous problems to finished artifacts.

This is a broad role for an exceptional generalist who can ship end-to-end design—from system design to packaging—while advancing our design culture as we scale.

Qualifications

• 1–5 years of real-world design experience.
• Portfolio demonstrating taste, product thinking and visual craft.
• Experience across product, software, brand, marketing, physical experiences.
• Fluency in Figma and modern prototyping tools.
• Experience using AI tools to realize designs.

Responsibilities

• Build and evolve Orchard’s design system.
• End-to-end product design for FruitScope OS from research to prototype to implementation.
• Own brand design across website, sales materials, stories, presentations and communications.
• Design marketing materials like tradeshow booths and packaging.
• Support Hardware with industrial-design thinking and operator experiences.
• Raise the company-wide quality bar through templates, feedback and design principles.
• Help define the future design organization as we grow.

Skills

Product thinking

Visual craft

Cross-functional

Prototyping

Ambiguity handling

Tools

Figma

Claude Code

Job description

At Orchard, we’re securing America’s food supply by building the AI Farmer that automates our nation’s farms. We are the industry leader, growing rapidly, and backed by more than $25 million from leading investors, including Quiet Capital, Shine Capital, and General Catalyst.

Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars in crop value are lost because critical farming decisions are made using incomplete and imprecise data. We’re building the technology to change that.

Our AI-powered camera systems mount to tractors and scan millions of trees, vines, and plants, capturing precise data on yield estimates, fruit size, crop health, disease, and more. We train edge vision AI models that analyze every plant and determine exactly what interventions and treatments it needs. That intelligence flows into FruitScope OS, our farm-management platform, where growers can understand their crops, make better decisions, and direct operations in the field.

Today, Orchard’s technology is trusted by some of our nation’s largest farms. They use our products to grow higher-quality crops while reducing chemical use and operating costs, helping them farm more profitably and sustainably than ever before.

Our Culture:

• Unshakeable Resilience– Our customers feed millions of people, and our customers depend on us. We are ultra-hardworking, never give up, and we do whatever it takes.
• Always Keep Moving – We make progress every day, and our impact is measured in decades.
• Improve Everything – At 1% success, we save millions of pounds of food from going to waste. If we are 100% successful we will impact the lives of billions of people across the world.
• Farmers First – Every team member spends at least a few days in the fields with our farmers each month
• No Job Beneath Us – We’re low ego, own every outcome, and are all working towards the same goal.

The Role:

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