Founding Hardware Lead

Rooted; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Rooted is building hardware and software to help ranchers manage animals and grazing with less manual labor. You’ll be our first hardware hire, taking the collar from early prototype through validation, certification, and production, tackling GPS, radios, battery, and solar constraints while keeping costs in sight.

As the lead hardware engineer, you’ll shape the architecture, select suppliers, and establish a credible production schedule and cost model in collaboration with the founders.

Qualifications

• Experience taking physical products from prototype to production.
• Ability to select suppliers and manage BOM and costs.
• Strong cross-disciplinary collaboration across mechanical, electrical, and design.

Responsibilities

• Review the prototype, identify risks, and define architecture and production plan.
• Lead validation and field testing and work with suppliers for production readiness.
• Own BOM, unit cost, and manufacturing readiness; coordinate with founders.

Job description

San Francisco or Kansas City · Full time

$170,000–$240,000 base + 1–2% equity

Regular travel to our ranches in Kansas and Mississippi

About Rooted

We’re building the hardware and software that let ranchers manage animals and grazing with far less manual labor. More precise grazing can improve pasture productivity, reduce feed and other input costs, and support healthier soil. Today, the labor required puts these practices out of reach for many ranches.

Our first product is a virtual fencing collar that lets ranchers move and contain cattle from an app. We have a working prototype, LOIs covering thousands of animals, and our own ranches where we can test what we build. Our investors include Slow Ventures, South Park Commons and El Cap.

We’re targeting tens of thousands of collars in year one and building toward millions.

The role

You’ll be our first and most experienced hardware hire, responsible for taking the collar from an early prototype through validation, certification and production.

The engineering challenge is substantial: GPS, multiple radios, battery and solar in something light enough for a young cow to wear and durable enough to survive years outdoors. Location accuracy, power consumption, reliability and manufacturing cost all matter to whether this works for ranchers.

We’re pre-EVT. The core functions work, but the device isn’t sealed, we haven’t chosen a production partner and certification hasn’t started. You’ll work directly with the founders to turn it into a product we can reliably manufacture, deploy and support.

What you’ll own

• Review the prototype, identify the biggest risks and develop the product architecture and production plan.


• Lead engineering, design and production validation, including field testing on cattle.


• Choose suppliers and manufacturing partners, and own the bill of materials, unit cost and manufacturing readiness.


• Bring in specialists for areas such as RF, power, tooling and certification, and take responsibility for how their work comes together.


• Establish the criteria for each build stage and decide when the product is ready to progress.

Anything affecting product success is open to change: architecture, enclosure, PCB, battery, radios, suppliers, testing, requirements and schedule. You’ll make those decisions with us, based on evidence, customer needs and what the business can sustain.

Who we’re looking for

You’ve been integral to taking a physical product from an early prototype into production. You can explain the technical and manufacturing decisions you owned, what went wrong and what ultimately shipped.

Your strongest discipline could be mechanical, electrical, product design, manufacturing or systems engineering. You need to be comfortable doing detailed engineering yourself, working across disciplines and knowing when to bring in specialist help.

Experience with small, sealed, connected devices is highly relevant. Resourcefulness, scrappiness and how quickly you learn matter more than having worked on every subsystem in this collar.

Your first priorities

Review the prototype, test the biggest technical risks, choose suppliers and establish a credible production schedule and cost model. You’ll help shape the hardware team and manufacturing relationships as we grow, with room to develop toward either technical leadership or a principal engineering role.