Staff Electrical Engineer

The Electric Plant; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 225,000 - 245,000; Full time

Job summary

The Electric Plant in San Francisco is hiring a Staff Electrical Engineer to own our sensing and signal-acquisition platform. This role spans analog design, embedded systems, sensor validation, and field deployment.

You’ll scale from working devices to fleet management, evolving versions and new products. You’ll design from electrode interfaces to firmware, collaborate with scientists and ML engineers, and drive data quality and platform capabilities across the hardware stack.

Qualifications

• Strong analog and mixed-signal design experience.
• Hands-on schematic capture, PCB bring-up, and debugging.
• Experience with electrophysiology or sensor interfaces is a plus.
• Technical leadership across engineering disciplines.
• Embedded C/C++ on ESP32/ARM and RTOS basics.
• Ability to validate sensors against reference data.
• Clear, low-ego communication and collaboration with teams.
• Proof of shipping end-to-end hardware products.

Responsibilities

• Set the electrical architecture for the sensing platform across analog front end, embedded systems, power, and field deployments.
• Own the mixed-signal front end for plant electrophysiology — electrode interfaces, instrumentation amplifiers, filtering, ADCs, and noise-floor characterization.
• Design, review, and bring up schematics and PCBAs across the IoT hardware stack.
• Establish the validation methods and characterization protocols that determine whether a signal is trustworthy.
• Partner with science and foundation-model teams to improve signal quality and data trainability.
• Build custom lab and research hardware — sensors, test rigs, and instrumentation.
• Contribute to embedded firmware development in C/C++ across ESP32 and LoRa platforms.
• Drive technical decisions influencing hardware performance and dataset quality.
• Bring up every new build with hands-on testing using oscilloscopes and analyzers.

Skills

Analog design

Mixed-signal design

Schematic capture

PCB bring-up

Embedded firmware (C/C++)

RTOS experience

Hardware validation

Collaboration with scientists

Tools

Altium

KiCad

ESP32 toolchain

LoRaWAN hardware

Job description

About The Electric Plant Co.

The Electric Plant Co. is building a new category of plant and tree intelligence. Our IoT hardware measures the hidden electrical signals in plants and trees, paired with environmental data, and our foundation model decodes those signals into real-time insights about plant health, growth, and stress. We're a small, fast-moving company in San Francisco working at the intersection of biology, hardware, AI, and IoT. We closed our seed round in November 2025, and we’re launching our first commercial deployments.

The Role

We are hiring a Staff Electrical Engineer to own the sensing and signal-acquisition platform at the core of our product. This is a full electronic stack role spanning analog design, embedded systems, sensor validation, and field deployment. The right candidate is a generalist who can handle a lot of breadth, recognize when and how to get help where there are knowledge gaps, and evolve from making working devices at scale to fleet management software, firmware updates, bug fixes, and development of new versions and products.

Our hardware measures electrical signals from living plants and trees in the field. Every signal our foundation model learns from flows through electronics that you design, validate, and improve. From electrode interfaces and analog front ends to embedded firmware, low-power field devices, and the hand-off to our ML training pipeline, you will determine what data reaches the model and how much signal survives the journey.

Alongside the core IoT product, you’ll build hardware that the rest of the company depends on — custom lab equipment, research sensors, and instrumentation that help our science team explore new signals before they become product features.

You will be the most experienced electrical engineer at the company and will help set the direction for how we design, validate, and evolve our sensing systems. You’ll collaborate with scientists, ML engineers, operations, and leadership, influencing decisions that span hardware architecture, dataset quality, and the future capabilities of the platform.

Every signal our foundation model learns from flows through what you build. You will set the upper bound on what the model can learn.

Tech stack: C/C++ firmware on ESP32 and low-power LoRa MCUs. Altium or KiCad. LoRaWAN, MQTT, and other IoT protocols on the edge. Python for test automation and characterization tooling.

What you'll do

• Set the electrical architecture for our sensing platform across analog front end, embedded systems, power, and field deployments.

• Own the mixed-signal front end for plant electrophysiology — electrode interfaces, instrumentation amplifiers, filtering, ADC chains, and noise-floor characterization against real plant signals.

• Design, review, and bring up schematics and PCBAs across the IoT hardware stack — multi-PCBA designs spanning analog front end, MCU/main, and power.

• Establish the validation methods and characterization protocols that determine whether a signal is trustworthy enough to become part of the dataset.

• Partner closely with the science and foundation-model teams to improve signal quality, evaluate new sensing approaches, and ensure the data captured in the field is actually trainable.

• Build custom lab and research hardware — purpose-built sensors, test rigs, and instrumentation that help the science team probe new signals before they become product features.

• Contribute to embedded firmware development in C/C++ across ESP32 and future low-power LoRa platforms, particularly for hardware bring-up, characterization, deployment, and debugging.

• Drive technical decisions that influence hardware performance, dataset quality, reliability, and future sensing capabilities.

• Bring up every new build with your own hands — oscilloscope, logic analyzer, and spectrum analyzer fluent.

What we're looking for

• 6–12 years developing and shipping electronic products, with a demonstrated history of owning real hardware systems end-to-end. We care more about products you’ve shipped and problems you’ve solved than a specific number of years.

• Strong mixed-signal and analog design experience. Instrumentation and precision amplifiers, ADCs, filtering, low-noise design, grounding, decoupling, and sensor interfaces are familiar territory.

• Hands‑on schematic capture, PCB design, bring-up, and debugging. You’ve debugged your own boards and understand the difference between a design that works in the lab and one that works in the field.

• Technical leadership across disciplines. You can work with scientists, ML engineers, operations, and leadership teams to make decisions that balance technical reality with company goals.

• Comfortable setting technical direction. Small company, small team, limited process scaffolding. You help establish how things get done.

• Embedded experience. You’ve shipped OT projects at scale, are strong in C/C++ on ESP32/ARM, and get the basics of RTOS.

• Experience proving that a sensor measures the physical quantity it claims to, through analog front end characterization, drift and bias quantification, and validation against independent reference data rather than against the previous build.

• Direct, low‑ego communicator. Comfortable saying “the data isn’t good enough yet,” “this architecture won’t scale,” or “we should simplify this.”

Successful candidates will likely come from one of two backgrounds:

• An analog‑and mixed‑signal‑focused electrical engineer who has shipped embedded products.

• An embedded systems engineer with unusually strong analog instincts and a track record of owning hardware products end‑to‑end.

Nice to have

• Biosensors, electrophysiology, neural interfaces, bioelectronics, or other low‑signal sensing systems — academic or industrial.

• Plant science exposure — published research, a personal interest, or just having put electrodes on a tree before.

• Low‑power IoT stacks (LoRaWAN, NB‑IoT, LTE‑M) and battery‑life optimization.

• DSP, digital filtering, or signal‑processing experience.

• Prior experience at a deep‑tech or hardware‑software company — physical AI, IoT, robotics, climate, life sciences.

• Prior outdoor or agricultural product experience — IP‑rated enclosures, environmental robustness, field‑serviceable design.

Compensation & logistics

• Salary range is $225k - $245k 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.