Founding Hardware Lead

Rooted Ag; San Francisco (CA); Vor Ort; USD 150.000 - 210.000; Vollzeit

Zusammenfassung

Rooted Agriculture Corporation seeks a principal hardware engineer to drive the end-to-end hardware development of our ranching collars and related devices. You will own architecture, enclosure, PCB, battery, radios, and the path to mass production, coordinating RF, certification, and tooling specialists as needed.

You will guide the integrated product from prototype through production, balancing performance, cost, and reliability while building the hardware team and manufacturing relationships

Qualifikationen

• Hands-on ownership of hardware from prototype to production.
• Experience delivering integrated hardware systems for mass production.
• Ability to select components, manage suppliers and validate designs.

Aufgaben

• Own the hardware architecture, enclosure, PCB, power, and signaling strategy.
• Lead cross-functional effort with RF, certification, tooling, and manufacturing.
• Define build gates, schedules, and cost targets for scalable collars.

Kenntnisse

Mechanical design

Electrical engineering

Manufacturing

Systems engineering

Ausbildung

Bachelor's degree in Engineering

Jobbeschreibung

Build the hardware that unlocks the future of ranching.

Rooted is the most reliable ranch hand a rancher can hire: one you don't have to find, train, or worry will quit. Drones, cameras, and collars that see every animal and acre, decide what needs doing, and do it.

We're using AI and robotics to replace scarce ranch labor and unlock precision grazing: less labor, more productive land and lower input costs, with the potential for better soil, water and carbon outcomes. We think this can fundamentally change pasture-based ranching across the U.S. and internationally. The U.S. alone has 27.6 million beef cows (USDA, January 2026), before counting other grazing cattle.

Rooted Agriculture Corporation

About Rooted

Rooted is the most reliable ranch hand a rancher can hire: one you don't have to find, train, or worry will quit. Drones, cameras, and collars that see every animal and acre, decide what needs doing, and do it.

We're using AI and robotics to replace scarce ranch labor and unlock precision grazing: less labor, more productive land and lower input costs, with the potential for better soil, water and carbon outcomes. We think this can fundamentally change pasture-based ranching across the U.S. and internationally. The U.S. alone has 27.6 million beef cows (USDA, January 2026), before counting other grazing cattle.

The job

Our first commercial product is a working virtual fencing collar, the first actuator in that system. A rancher moves and contains cattle from an app, with no physical fence. You’d take it through EVT, DVT, PVT and certification into mass production, owning the build ladder, design freeze, BOM and unit cost, specialists and factory.

We're targeting tens of thousands of collars in year one. Real success means millions. The product and manufacturing system you build have to grow into that.

Virtual fencing already exists. We're building for continuous, precise management: cattle moved from software, grazing adjusted as conditions change. That means accurately controlling where cattle graze, across a whole herd, with collars that can stay on the animals for years. Our bet is on location accuracy, power usage and integration with the rest of the Rooted hardware stack.

You’ll bring in specialists where you need them and be responsible for how their work comes together in the finished product. You’ll identify, hire and judge the RF, certification, power and tooling specialists we need, and hold them to the plan.

You’d be our first and most experienced hardware hire. Anything affecting product success is in scope to change: architecture, enclosure, PCB, battery, radios, suppliers, test plan, requirements and schedule. You’ll make those decisions with us, based on evidence, customer needs and what the business can sustain. You set the build gates and have the authority to hold them.

Where we are

Two people built this in a couple of months: GPS fixes over LTE-M to the cloud, a fence drawn on a map, and a collar that acts on it. The power budget is measured; boards are designed, built and tested in‑house.

We're pre-EVT. Nothing is sealed, there's no production partner and certification hasn't started. We've built enough to prove the core functions; turning that into a product we can manufacture and stand behind is the job.

We have LOIs covering thousands of animals before shipping our first production unit, and our design partner is a working ranch in Oklahoma, one of the leading regenerative operations in the country, co-developing the product with us and running the first pilot. We run our own ranches in Kansas and Mississippi, so we can put collars on animals whenever we're ready. Investors include Slow Ventures, South Park Commons and El Cap.

What's left

The hard work is in the integrated product.

A seal, materials and mounting that survive years of weather and a thousand-pound cow rubbing against a steel gatepost. Several radios, battery and solar in something light enough for a young cow, with antennas that work beside the animal. You'll also need to get it certified and into production at a cost that works for ranchers.

If you read that and started answering in your head, we should talk.

You

You’ve been integral to taking a physical product from an early prototype into production, with hands‑on ownership of decisions when designs failed, suppliers slipped and manufacturing exposed things the prototype didn’t.

Your strongest discipline might be mechanical, electrical, product design, manufacturing or systems engineering. We care whether you can hold the integrated product in your head, get into the details yourself and know when to bring in someone better than you.

Small, sealed, connected-device experience is highly relevant, not mandatory. Resourcefulness, scrappiness and how quickly you learn matter more than a résumé containing every subsystem in this collar. Tell us what you owned, what you learned and where you'd need help.

This isn't for you if you haven't touched the engineering in five years, if you go quiet outside your own discipline, or if you're used to ownership sitting with the client. There's no crank to turn here, no neatly defined handoffs, and no escalation point when something looks too hard.

What you get out of it

You’ll take our first product into production and build the team and manufacturing relationships we need as we grow. You'll choose much of the hardware and manufacturing approach we'll use as we grow to millions of collars. You choose specialist help and test on our own cattle without waiting for another herd. As we add products, you could lead the hardware team or stay focused on the technical work as a principal engineer.

The first six months

You’ll start by reviewing the prototype and working with us on what needs to change for production. That includes testing the biggest risks, choosing suppliers and working out what it will cost to build. Our targets are production validation units on cattle by the end of 2026 and a first production run in Q1 2027. You'll work with us to set a realistic schedule and get the first production collars into the hands of ranchers who are waiting to use them.

Show us what you've built.

We'll review examples of your past work.