Founding Hardware Engineer

Herd Cycle is building the Fitbit for cows
.

We design low-cost smart IoT ear tags and software that detect heat cycles, illness, and activity in real time — helping cattle and dairy operators catch problems before they get expensive.

Founded by a 4th-generation cattle rancher
, Herd Cycle is built in the field, not a lab. In the past few months, we’ve:

• Shipped and deployed working hardware on live ranches
• Secured paid pre-orders
• Been backed by Founders Inc.

This is a real hardware company shipping real devices to real customers.

We’re hiring a Founding Engineer to join the company at its earliest stage and help own core technical systems end-to-end.

You’ll work directly with the founder to design, build, and scale the full stack:

hardware → firmware → data → software

This is a high-ownership role with real technical responsibility. You will ship production systems that run on live devices deployed in the real world.

Depending on your strengths, you’ll take ownership of areas such as:

• Embedded systems and firmware (low-power sensing, LoRa data, reliability)
• Backend systems for ingesting and processing IoT data
• Data pipelines and analytics for health and heat-cycle detection
• Internal tools and dashboards for herd monitoring
• Debugging and improving system performance across hardware and software

You’ll help shape technical architecture, product roadmap decisions, and early engineering culture.

We’re looking for builders with strong technical fundamentals and high ownership.

You should have:

• Strong programming ability (Python, JavaScript/Type Script, C/C++, or similar)
• Experience shipping real systems (startup, research lab, production software, or hardware)
• Comfort working across the stack and learning quickly
• Strong problem-solving skills and bias toward action
• Willingness to work on-site and build hands-on

• Embedded systems or hardware experience
• IoT, sensors, or wireless communication experience
• Cloud infrastructure experience (AWS, GCP, Supabase, etc.)
• Frontend frameworks (React, Next.js)
• Prior early-stage startup experience

• BS/MS/PhD in CS, EE, ME, or a related technical field

• Real ownership at an early-stage, venture-backed hardware startup
• Work on live systems deployed in the real world
• See the full system end-to-end
  , not a narrow slice
• Competitive salary + meaningful equity
• Opportunity to grow into a long-term technical leadership role