Senior Software Engineer

Hippo Harvest; Pescadero (CA); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 195,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Six weeks of paid vacation

Medical/dental/vision/life insurance

Twelve weeks of paid parental leave

401k with company match

Company stock options

Hybrid work schedule with Wednesday on

Job summary

Hippo Harvest in California seeks an engineer who can trace symptoms across a dense information space—UI, services, data, and robots—and own problems end-to-end across the stack. You will work with plant scientists and operators to ensure reliable operation of mixed hardware and software systems on a greenhouse farm.

You will shape the architecture for future systems, collaborate with ML and operations teams, and push for practical AI tooling with responsible, verifiable results.

Qualifications

• Track record of shipping and operating production software that real people rely on.
• Experience across the full stack: frontend, backend, and infrastructure.
• Experience in robotics/automation/logistics domains with complex backend systems.
• Ability to build an accurate mental model of large systems quickly.
• Strong instincts for data modeling and evolving interfaces.
• Practical fluency with AI coding tools and cautious verification.
• Curiosity and willingness to explore unfamiliar systems using AI assistance.

Responsibilities

• Own problems end-to-end across the stack—from interfaces to data models to hardware.
• Tackle cross-cutting, ambiguous problems and drive production-ready resolutions.
• Debug across UI, service, query, network, or hardware boundaries and isolate failures.
• Shape architectural decisions for long-term systems.
• Collaborate with plant science, operations, ML, and commercial teams.
• Apply AI tooling judiciously and ensure safe, reliable deployments.
• Leave systems more understandable for future work.

Skills

Full stack engineering

System architecture

Data modeling

AI tooling

Robotics domain experience

Debug across boundaries

Tools

Grafana

ArgoCD

GitHub Actions

Kubernetes

Job description

In a world increasingly impacted by climate change, pollution, and population growth, conventional production of fresh/fruiting vegetables is unsustainable. Compared to field production, greenhouse hydroponic methods use 90% less water, increase yields, reduce food waste, use fewer pesticides, eliminate fertilizer runoff, and allow crops to be grown locally. However, greenhouse producers make up only a small part of today's market due to high capital/labor costs and operational complexity. To close this gap, Hippo Harvest uses new methods of hydroponics, robotics, and machine intelligence to re-imagine greenhouses and build the sustainable, economical, and scalable production systems of the future.

The Role

This is a role for a generalist — someone who follows a problem wherever it goes rather than stopping at the edge of a component they own.

Running a greenhouse with automated systems and mobile robots means holding several hard systems in tension at once. There are the people: plant scientists and operators who need to plan, intervene, and understand what the farm is doing, through interfaces that have to be clear and concise about a messy physical world. There is the backend: services that schedule work, track state, reconcile plans against reality, and keep a durable record of everything that happened. And underneath all of it there is the farm itself — robots, mechanisms, plants, and water — which is the least forgiving of the three and refuses to behave like an abstraction.

The interesting problems live in between these layers, and they rarely announce which layer they came from. We're looking for an engineer who can trace a symptom from a an imprecise report of something looking wrong on an information-dense screen, through a service boundary, into a database, and out to a robot that stopped moving — and then decide where the real fix belongs. That requires being able to fit the whole system in your head, and being willing to work in unfamiliar parts of it.

You'll have significant influence over architecture, and significant responsibility for systems that people depend on to grow food every day.

You Will

• Own problems end-to-end across the stack — from operator-facing interfaces, through backend services and data models, into infrastructure, and out to the physical systems those layers ultimately control
• Take on the ambiguous, cross-cutting problems that don't have an obvious owner, and drive them to a resolution that holds up in production
• Debug across boundaries: instrument, bisect, and reason about failures that could originate in a UI, a service, a query, a network, or the hardware itself — and carry the investigation far enough to isolate and characterize the failure, even when the fix ultimately belongs to another team
• Shape the architecture of systems that will be built on for years, and exercise judgment about what needs to be built well, what needs to be built fast, and what shouldn't be built at all
• Work directly with our plant science, operations, machine learning, and commercial teams — the requirements for this work come from watching people run a farm and from what the science needs to measure, not from a backlog
• Use AI tooling aggressively and well, while taking full responsibility for what ships
• Leave the systems you touch more understandable than you found them, so the rest of the team can build on them
• Join the team in Pescadero for our communal farm day every Wednesday — the whole company on site together, hands on the system you're building for — with more time at the farm when a problem calls for it

You Have

• A substantial track record of shipping and operating production software that real people relied on — including the parts where it broke and you fixed it. This role sits above the level where close guidance is available; we are looking for someone who has already done hard things in the real world.
• Production experience across the full stack: front-end, backend, and infrastructure. Not equal depth in all three, but genuine, shipped work in each.
• Experience in a domain with real-world coupling — robotics, automation, logistics, manufacturing, large-scale distributed systems, or similar — where demanding user workflows sit on top of complex backend systems that sit on top of a foundation that is chaotic at the deepest level and resists clean characterization. Comfort with the fact that this bottom layer is the source of truth and it is frequently unpleasant.
• A demonstrated ability to cut through complexity: to build an accurate mental model of a large system quickly, find the load-bearing parts, and explain it to someone else.
• Strong instincts for data modeling and for evolving schemas and interfaces in systems that can't be taken offline.
• Practical fluency with AI coding tools, applied with judgment. AI assistance is essential to working at this breadth, and we lean on it heavily — but it fails in specific, recognizable ways. We want someone with a sixth sense for where an answer is about to go wrong, and the discipline to verify before it reaches a robot.
• Curiosity, doggedness, and the courage to open up an unfamiliar system and start reading. We expect you to use AI assistance to get oriented in unfamiliar code fast — as a way into understanding a system, not a substitute for understanding it.

Nice to Have

We would rather hire someone with a wide, unusual range than someone who checks a specific set of boxes. That said, the following are all directly useful:

• React or comparable modern front-end experience
• Python
• Rust, especially for microservices — other compiled-language experience (C++, Go) is valuable too
• Relational databases, and the operational side of running them
• Observability and monitoring tooling such as Grafana
• GitOps and CI/CD practice — ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, Kubernetes
• Simulation, testing, and infrastructure for systems that can't be fully exercised in production
• Prior experience at a small company, where the boundaries of your job were whatever needed doing

If your background is both broad and deep but doesn't line up neatly with the list above, we'd still like to hear from you. What we can't substitute for is depth — having carried real systems into production and lived with your own decisions afterward. Tell us about the ones that taught you the most.

We Offer

• An exciting and fun work environment where your contributions will make a true difference
• A hybrid work environment built around our Wednesday communal farm day in Pescadero, with the rest of the week working from home
• Full benefits package including six weeks of paid vacation, medical/dental/vision/life insurance, twelve weeks of paid parental leave, 401k with company match, company stock options