Senior Machine Learning Engineer

The Electric Plant; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 223,000 - 253,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Early-stage equity

Standard benefits

Job summary

The Electric Plant Co. is building a new category of plant intelligence and shipping Bombadil—a platform that decodes signals into real-time plant health insights.

You’ll join a small, fast-moving team working on training data, architecture decisions, and rigorous evaluation to drive progress from idea to production. This senior, individual contributor role reports to our Head of AI & ML and focuses on building scalable training systems and lifecycle practices with meaningful equity and standard

Qualifications

• Has built and trained transformer models from scratch and can discuss data, architecture, and training stability.
• 3+ years of hands-on transformer experience within 5-10 years of ML/engineering background.
• Has shipped or maintained ML systems in a practical capacity.
• Comfortable driving projects end-to-end from data collection through evaluation.

Responsibilities

• Train transformers end-to-end from data collection to production.
• Evaluate core model with robust metrics and refinements.
• Develop robust model lifecycle systems for rapid iteration.
• Build and maintain training and evaluation infrastructure.

Skills

Transformer training

Model evaluation

ML infrastructure

End-to-end project leadership

Software engineering fundamentals

Job description

About The Electric Plant Co.

The Electric Plant Co. is building a new category of plant intelligence. Our Model, Bombadil, decodes those signals into real-time insights about plant health, growth, and stress. Our IoT hardware measures the hidden electrical signals in plants and trees, paired with environmental data, and our foundation model. We're a small, fast-moving company working at the intersection of biology, hardware, AI, and IoT.

The Role

You'll join the small team building Bombadil and work directly on training: the data the model learns from, the architecture and training decisions that determine whether a run succeeds, and the evaluation work to measure our progress. This is a small team. You’ll drive machine learning projects from idea to production from end-to-end, rather than specializing into one piece of a much larger machine, and you’ll help build systems and practices that scale.

This is a senior, individually-contributing role with no direct reports, reporting to our Head of AI & ML.

What You'll Own

• Transformer training. Model architecture, data curation, training strategies, and the full lifecycle to production.

• Evaluation of the core model. Building and refining evaluations to measure progress of new model capabilities.

• Model lifecycle practices. Develop robust, repeatable model lifecycle systems for rapid iteration.

What We're Looking For

• Has built and trained transformer models from scratch, not only fine‑tuned them, and can speak concretely to the data, architecture, and training‑stability decisions involved.

• Roughly 3+ years of hands‑on transformer‑specific experience is ideal, generally within 5-10 years of overall ML/engineering experience.

• Has shipped or maintained ML systems in a practical capacity.

• Comfortable driving projects end‑to‑end, from data collection through evaluation, without a large specialized team around you.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals: you build and maintain real training and evaluation infrastructure, not just notebooks.

• Technical or scientific depth, not necessarily in CS or ML specifically.

• Comfortable being one of a very small number of people responsible for a company's core model.

Strong plus

• Experience with biological, environmental, or other scientific data.

What This Isn't

This isn't a role for someone who wants a large ML org's infrastructure and specialization already built around them; on a team this size, you'll cover more of the pipeline yourself. It's also not a pure research role: the work has to end up in a model that ships, not just a result that publishes. If you want to bring new skills to a small team building something new, and to build the practice as much as the model, we'd like to talk.

Compensation & logistics

• Salary range is $223k - $253k per year, with meaningful early‑stage equity

• 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.