Mechanical Engineering Manager

Role – As the Mechanical Engineering Manager at Local Roots, you’ll be overseeing the mechanical engineering team responsible for designing and building the products that will enable us to provide flavorful affordable food to everyone. You’ll have responsibility over all mechanical engineering projects including structures design, heating ventilation and cooling (HVAC) design both within the TerraFarm and throughout a farming site including incorporation of the latest cooling and ventilation technologies, fluid flow and airflow dynamics to provide the required airflow to the meristem of each individual plant, thermal management, irrigation, power distribution, and more. You will also be responsible for developing new automation projects together with the entire engineering team. We’ll expect you to be a systems level leader who takes a systems engineering perspective to all of our technical challenges and focuses on hitting high level functional requirements that allow us to achieve our business goals. You’ll need to be creative, solve problems, and motivate your team to rapidly build new technology to solve the challenges at the forefront agriculture. 

Responsibilities – You should be confident making significant contributions in the following categories:

• Manage a team of mechanical engineers to complete all our design projects
• Develop new HVAC technologies and integrate them into our TerraFarm and FarmOps
• Design our irrigation fluid flow systems (fertigation, pH management, temperature control, water delivery, recovery, recycling, etc.)
• Develop our airflow systems (efficiently deliver sufficient airflow with the right temperature, humidity, and CO2 characteristics to optimize plant growth)
• Design and develop the automation solutions to fully automate all aspects of our FarmOps
• Ultimately own the CAD (Solidworks) model, BOM management, and collaboration with our Supply Chain team in sourcing, and procuring
• Organize, motivate, lead, recruit, develop, train, and inspire a team of engineers (mechanical, civil, structures, automation, etc.)
• Interface with mechanical, software, automation, and manufacturing engineers on other teams
• Define standardized development processes and metric collection, analysis, and utilization to improve efficiency and quality throughout the engineering process Fast prototyping skills, including hands-on machine tools experience
• Experience taking products through UL 1598 and 8750 and IP 67

Requirements – Your background should include the following:

• Extensive experience managing mechanical, structural, and fluids projects
• Automation expertise including work in motion systems, robotics, and computer vision
• BS in ME or similar

Bonus Skills – Bonus points if any of these also describe you:

• MS or PhD in engineering; 10+ years professional experience in mechanical engineering 
• Expertise in biology, plant physiology, and horticultural 
• Experience with user interfaces, networking, and industrial automation