Hippo Harvest Manufacturing and Equipment Engineer Pescadero, CA · Full time

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Overview

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.

As a manufacturing and equipment engineer, you’ll take point on scaling our systems from single digit builds to tens immediately, with an eye to hundreds in the future. We are on the cusp of needing to dramatically increase our production to meet commercial demand, and we need your expertise to make this transition as seamless as possible. Your responsibilities will include guiding the development of our inventory and manufacturing tracking system, refining our custom on-robot hardware with an eye towards manufacturability, robustness, and maintainability, and creating clever staging and validation methods for our hardware that will allow us to easily diagnose and fix problems. If you are the sort of the person who has strong opinions on what connectors are most robust, how to design wiring harnesses to be easy to manufacture, and the best approaches to helping technicians triage and fix problematic hardware, then you’ll be a great fit!

You Will

• Iteratively improve our robotic and greenhouse automation systems with an eye towards manufacturability, cost reduction, and debugability, especially in areas like wiring, connectors, layout, and waterproofing
• Design our hardware inventory tracking system so that we know what components were used to build each system, can track spares, and can plan out manufacturing runs
• Help advise operations as we expand and train our technician team, as well as designing processes and fixtures that permit them to efficiently address a wide range of hardware issues
• Spec out and interface with external suppliers of conventional greenhouse automation for installation, problem solving, and development of maintenance procedures

You Have

• At least two years of hands-on job work experience with complex manufactured components
• Direct experience, as a power user or administrator, with a production-grade inventory management system
• Some facility with mechanical design software, such as Solidworks or Fusion 360
• Experience working closely with technician and operations teams
• Some formal training in engineering is nice to have, but less important than extensive hands-on work experience and good systems-level intuition

We Offer

• An exciting and fun work environment where your contributions will make a true difference
• A hybrid work environment, with 4 days a week in person at our Pescadero facility, and 1 day a week working from home
• Competitive salary from $83,258 to $122,222 based on level
• 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