Hardware Engineer

Department: Hardware Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Compensation: $100K – $170K • Offers Bonus

Employment Type: FullTime

At Orchard, we’re securing America’s food supply by building the AI Farmer that automates our nation’s farms. We are the industry leader, growing rapidly, and backed by more than $25 million from leading investors, including Quiet Capital, Shine Capital, and General Catalyst.

Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars in crop value are lost because critical farming decisions are made using incomplete and imprecise data. We’re building the technology to change that.

Our AI-powered camera systems mount to tractors and scan millions of trees, vines, and plants, capturing precise data on yield estimates, fruit size, crop health, disease, and more. We train edge vision AI models that analyze every plant and determine exactly what interventions and treatments it needs. That intelligence flows into FruitScope OS, our farm-management platform, where growers can understand their crops, make better decisions, and direct operations in the field.

Today, Orchard’s technology is trusted by some of our nation’s largest farms. They use our products to grow higher-quality crops while reducing chemical use and operating costs, helping them farm more profitably and sustainably than ever before.

Our Culture:

• Unshakeable Resilience – Our customers feed millions of people, and our customers depend on us. We are ultra-hardworking, never give up, and we do whatever it takes.

• Always Keep Moving – We move fast, waste no time, and have an extreme bias towards action. Progress compounds every day, and our impact is measured in decades.

• Improve Everything – At 1% success, we save millions of pounds of food from going to waste. If we are 100% successful we will impact the lives of billions of people across the world.

• Farmers First – Every team member spends at least a few days in the fields with our farmers each month.

• No Job Beneath Us – We’re low ego, own every outcome, and are all working towards the same goal.

The Role:

We’re hiring a Hardware Engineer to design, build, and improve Orchard’s agricultural camera systems. Working closely with our Hardware Lead, you’ll take ownership of mechanical CAD and design projects, handle electrical integration and troubleshooting, and help establish quality checks for the assemblies and subassemblies we build.

This is a broad, hands-on role within our Hardware team. On a given day, you might refine an enclosure in CAD, build a wiring harness, diagnose a power issue, or develop a test fixture. You’ll take projects from a design concept to working hardware, then help make that hardware reliable and repeatable in production.

Our cameras operate on tractors and farm vehicles exposed to harsh vibration, impact, dust, water, and heat. You’ll work across mechanical and electrical systems to solve those challenges, partnering with our Perception and Embedded Software teams on system requirements and interfaces while owning the physical hardware work within the Hardware team.

What You’ll Own

• Own mechanical design projects

• Build and integrate electrical systems

• Make repeatable testing processes

• Troubleshoot hardware

• Develop assembly and subassembly QA

• Design for real-world use

• Support production and manufacturing, while iteratively improving designs

What We Look For

• 3+ years of professional hardware or mechanical engineering experience developing electromechanical products, with hands-on work across both.

• Strong mechanical design and 3D CAD skills, including complex assemblies, production drawings, tolerancing, materials, fasteners, and DFM.

• Experience designing machined, sheet-metal, and 3D-printed components and taking designs from concept to production hardware.

• Practical electrical skills: reading wiring schematics, selecting components, building harnesses, crimping and soldering, and troubleshooting power and connectivity.

• Experience building prototypes and developing hardware tests end-to-end.

• Ability to own projects independently while working closely with our Hardware Lead on priorities and design decisions.

• Clear documentation and communication, careful follow-through, and willingness to move between CAD, the workbench, and production troubleshooting.
  

Things that are a plus:

• Experience with cameras, NVIDIA Jetson, Linux.

• Test fixtures, production QA, environmental testing, or rugged hardware.

• Sheet-metal enclosure design and PEM hardware

• PCB design and board-level debugging.

About the Opportunity

• Full-time role, five days a week at our San Francisco office

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage with 100% of employee premiums covered.

• The opportunity to own hardware projects end to end.

• Our team is close-knit and highly driven. You’ll work closely with our CEO, Hardware Lead, Operations team, and all of our engineers.

• We move fast, and sometimes this means staying late or working weekends.

• We’re deeply motivated by the impact we’re making – every system we build and deploy means less food that goes to waste, and more people who are fed.