Product Software Engineer

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.

The Role

As a Product Software Engineer, you'll take ownership of the internal tools and systems that power Hippo Harvest's operations from end to end. This is a product-focused engineering role — your primary customers are the people inside our organization, and your success is measured by how effectively our teams can do their jobs. You'll think in terms of workflows and outcomes, not just features and tickets.

The systems you'll work on span the full arc of our business: from sales forecasts that inform greenhouse planting schedules, through the growing and harvest process, into operations and packing, and onward through distribution until our product appears on store shelves. You'll develop a deep understanding of how decisions made at one point in that chain propagate through the rest of it, and you'll build tools that make those interdependencies visible and manageable.

This is a senior role that requires both strong technical execution and genuine product leadership. We have strong project management support, but product thinking lives in engineering — you'll own the full problem space, from understanding user needs through to how solutions get prioritized, architected and built. Beyond doing that yourself, you'll help raise the product thinking of the broader engineering organization — establishing practices around user research, prioritization, and iterative delivery that others can learn from and build on. You'll lead requirements discovery with a diverse group of internal stakeholders — including commercial, operations, logistics, and plant science teams — synthesizing competing needs into coherent, prioritized solutions. You'll prototype early and often to get fast feedback, and, working in concert with other engineers, you'll take those prototypes through to production-grade systems.

You Will

• Own the product vision and roadmap for internal tooling, in close collaboration with stakeholders across the organization
• Develop deep familiarity with the workflows of our commercial, operations, growing, packing, and distribution teams
• Help build product culture across the engineering organization — modeling strong discovery, prioritization, and iteration practices that others can adopt
• Lead requirements discovery sessions and translate ambiguous needs into clear, actionable specifications
• Use AI-assisted development tools to move quickly from concept to working prototype, generating real artifacts that stakeholders can react to rather than documents they have to imagine
• Take validated designs through to production-grade systems that are robust, maintainable, and scalable
• Identify how data flows across systems — from demand forecasting through fulfillment — and surface insights that help teams make better decisions

You Have

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years in a product-focused or product-adjacent role
• A genuine product mindset: you think first about the problem and the user, and you're comfortable sitting with ambiguity before reaching for a solution
• Strong systems thinking — you can model how changes in one part of a workflow affect others, and you design with those dependencies in mind
• Enough front-end fluency to build working prototypes that feel real — you don't need to be a React perfectionist, but stakeholders should be able to use what you build
• Solid foundational back-end skills sufficient to build and integrate APIs, understand data pipelines, and collaborate effectively with back-end engineers
• Hands-on fluency with agentic AI-assisted development tools — we heavily leverage Claude Code internally, and we expect candidates to already be using tools like it to compress the gap between idea and working prototype
• Experience facilitating stakeholder interviews, writing requirements, and managing feedback across non-technical audiences
• The ability to build quickly and scrappily when speed matters, and carefully when it doesn't
• Experience integrating custom solutions over-the-top of 3rd-party APIs and writing “glue-code” that connects internal services to business software and APIs

We Offer

• An exciting and fun work environment where your contributions will make a true difference
• A hybrid work environment, with 1 day a week in person at our Pescadero facility, and 4 days a 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