The Company
At Smallhold, we’re building the resilient farming infrastructure of the future. From advanced distribution and farming hubs to modular, high-output technology-enabled Minifarms, we’re bringing the farm to the people, supplying the freshest organic produce to entire cities on a block-by-block basis.
Since 2017, Smallhold has established itself as the leader in US specialty mushroom production with our products found in top retailers like Whole Foods and Central Market and some of the nation’s most exciting restaurant kitchens, such as Maison Yaki, the Standard Hotels, and Bunker Vietnamese.
Our mushrooms, farms, and team (including an amazing cohort of farmers) have been featured in publications like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Gizmodo, Bon Appetit, Martha Stewart — to name a few.
What’s next for Smallhold? Our network is growing and with it we’re rapidly expanding our infrastructure, building farms in new markets and bringing specialty mushrooms to more people than ever before. We have big plans for this year and need people like you to help us spread our roots across the country!
The Position
Smallhold is looking for an in-house Director of Software to lead the software development of the new generation of distributed farms. You’ll be designing software while supporting all production processes within a multidisciplinary team of engineers. You’ll be responsible for the day to day operations of the Smallhold Software Platform, leading a team of Software Engineers, becoming a core member of the larger Engineering team of capable engineers to internationally scale Smallhold’s Distributed Farm, changing the fundamentals of food distribution.
The Challenge
In this role, you will be responsible for:
- Design and implement robust mushroom growing control systems for Macro and Mini farms.
- Work with software engineers to design efficient, scalable, remote data reporting over 4G networks
- Help build manufacturing test and remote firmware update systems for large, high reliability, high power products
- Interface an expanding stream of environmental, growth, and harvesting data with backend databases, user interfaces, and data visualization
- Connect manufacturing data with product lifecycle tracking, over-the-air updates, and fleet management systems
- Owning external contractor communication and managing the milestones of those projects
- Constantly evaluating new technologies to keep expanding the capabilities of the Smallhold Platform
- Creating a system to manage continuous improvement, collecting feedback from the farms back to the team
Qualifications
The ideal candidate will have:
- A Computer Science or Engineering Degree, or similar education and experience equivalent to a BS.
- 5+ years of full-stack development, using Javascript, and Python. Embedded firmware experience is a plus.
- 5+ years of backend server, database, and IoT fleet management system design and development using Javascript, and Python. Design for Test in a manufacturing context experience a plus.
- Experience building scalable infrastructures and distributed applications on the cloud.
- Strong familiarity with high and low layer communications protocols, APIs, and technologies such as MQTT, TLS, DNS, SSH, etc. and a working knowledge of cellular communication.
- High reliability Linux networking development.
- Experience with QA, unit, and integration testing with a hardware product.
- Comfort working in a dynamic environment with a variety of skill levels and personalities.
- Eagerness to learn and undertake new projects with minimal supervision.
- Leadership/management experience.
**Experience with any of the following is an asset that should be highlighted in the cover letter:
- Browser and server-side development using Django.
- UI/UX design.
- API development experience (REST, GraphQL)
- Embedded firmware experience, including control and communication systems.
- Hardware product Design for Test and Design for Manufacturing experience.
- Source control principles (Git, SVN).
- UL, CE, and FCC certification.
- Architectural or Agricultural building automation systems.
- RF radio and cellular communication systems and protocols.