---
title: 'Founding Recruiter & People Operations at Orchard Robotics'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/founding-recruiter-people-operations-orchard-robotics-san-francisco-g9k0z39hppg5'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-07'
---

# Founding Recruiter & People Operations at Orchard Robotics

- **Company:** Orchard Robotics
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-08-23
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-07
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/orchard/b06ef00c-d377-4b83-b875-94f49a03bff2

## Job description

At Orchard, we’re securing America’s food supply by building the AI Farmer that automates our nation’s farms. We are the industry leader, growing rapidly, and backed by more than $25 million from leading investors, including Quiet Capital, Shine Capital, and General Catalyst.

Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars in crop value are lost because critical farming decisions are made using incomplete and imprecise data. We’re building the technology to change that.

Our AI-powered camera systems mount to tractors and scan millions of trees, vines, and plants, capturing precise data on yield estimates, fruit size, crop health, disease, and more. We train edge vision AI models that analyze every plant and determine exactly what interventions and treatments it needs. That intelligence flows into FruitScope OS, our farm-management platform, where growers can understand their crops, make better decisions, and direct operations in the field.

Today, Orchard’s technology is trusted by some of our nation’s largest farms. They use our products to grow higher-quality crops while reducing chemical use and operating costs, helping them farm more profitably and sustainably than ever before.

## OUR CULTURE:

- Unshakeable Resilience – Our customers feed millions of people, and our customers depend on us. We are ultra-hardworking, never give up, and we do whatever it takes.
- Always Keep Moving – We move fast, waste no time, and have an extreme bias towards action. Progress compounds every day, and our impact is measured in decades.
- Improve Everything – At 1% success, we save millions of pounds of food from going to waste. If we are 100% successful we will impact the lives of billions of people across the world.
- Farmers First – Every team member spends at least a few days in the fields with our farmers each month.
- No Job Beneath Us – We’re low ego, own every outcome, and are all working towards the same goal.

## THE ROLE:

Orchard is entering its most ambitious period of growth yet. The quality and pace of our hiring will determine how quickly we can serve more farmers, and the systems we build now will shape the company for years.

You will be Orchard’s first dedicated recruiting and people hire. Reporting directly to our CEO, you will personally recruit critical hires while building a durable talent engine: sourcing, interview design, closing, onboarding, HR systems, benefits, compliance, and culture.

This is a builder role. You will spend roughly 2/3-rds of your time recruiting and 1/3-rd building and running our internal people operations. You should be equally comfortable sourcing an exceptional engineer, improving an onboarding process, handling a benefits question in our HRIS, and preparing Orchard for our next stage of growth.

## WHAT YOU’LL OWN

- Lead full-cycle recruiting for critical technical and operations roles.
- Build repeatable sourcing channels and an exceptional recruiting brand.
- Create and own an exceptional candidate experience.
- Partner with leaders to define roles precisely, calibrate talent bars, move candidates quickly, and close exceptional hires.
- Own the employee lifecycle, including new hire onboarding, HRIS, benefits, leave administration, and day-to-day people operations.
- Maintain practical, compliant employment policies.
- Protect and strengthen Orchard’s culture as the company scales.

## WHAT WE LOOK FOR

- 3-7+ years of experience recruiting, with real ownership in a fast-growing startup or high-performance environment.
- A track record of personally recruiting and closing exceptional technical talent.
- Experience helping an organization scale from 10's of employees to 100+.
- Strong sourcing instincts and the creativity to reach candidates who are not actively applying.
- Strong operating rigor across recruiting funnels, headcount plans, and people systems.
- Comfort owning all processes around creating a stellar work environment for our team.
- Hands-on experience with HRIS, benefits, onboarding, and other core people operations.

## ABOUT THE OPPORTUNITY

- Full-time role, five days a week at our San Francisco office.
- Medical, dental, and vision coverage with 100% of employee premiums covered.
- The opportunity to build Orchard’s Recruiting and People function from the ground up.
- Our team is close-knit and highly driven. You’ll work directly with our CEO and every functional leader.
- We move fast, and sometimes this means staying late or working weekends.
- We’re deeply motivated by the impact we’re making – every system we build and deploy means less food that goes to waste, and more people who are fed.

## About Orchard Robotics

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Orchard Robotics builds an AI-powered camera system and farm management software that gives fruit growers precision data about every tree, vine, or plant to automate and optimize farm decisions.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A – raised $22M in October 2025)
- **Headquarters**: Ithaca, New York, USA
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: Charlie Wu (CEO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industries**: Agricultural technology (AgTech), Artificial Intelligence, Robotics
- **Target customers**: B2B – fruit growers (apple, wine & table grape, blueberry, cherry, almond, pistachio, citrus, strawberry) and farm management companies, from small farms (100 acres) to large operations (10,000+ acres)
- **Mission**: “Securing America’s food supply by building the AI farmer that automates our farms” – making farming profitable, efficient, and sustainable.

## Products & Services
- **FruitScope Vision**: AI-powered camera system that mounts to any tractor or farm vehicle. Captures ultra-high-resolution images of fruit (size, color, health) while driving at 1–12 mph. Data processed on-device overnight, available the next morning.
- **FruitScope Vault**: Cloud-based system-of-record that stores and tracks billions of fruit across tens of millions of trees/vines across seasons.
- **FruitScope OS**: Modern farm management software suite that integrates with existing operations, allowing growers to view data and make decisions (pruning, spraying, thinning, harvesting, etc.).
- **Canary (coming soon)**: AI decision-making engine that will automate and optimize farm actions across the entire operation, powered by the largest datasets in the world for managed crops.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding raised – $25.8M (as of 2025)
- **Funding History**: Pre-Seed ($600K, 2022) led by Contrary; Seed ($3.2M, 2024); Series A ($22M, October 2025) led by Shine Capital and Quiet Capital
- **Notable Investors**: Shine Capital, Quiet Capital, General Catalyst, Contrary, Howard Lerman, Nico Rosberg, Ravelin Capital
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew 207% YoY to 32 employees; monthly job postings up 8.3%; expanded to support 8+ crop types; deployed in some of the nation’s largest apple and grape farms; patents filed (e.g., “Air veil system for sensor housing”).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Full-stack hardware+software**: Rugged, farm-tough camera system designed in the USA, coupled with proprietary AI and cloud software.
- **On-device processing**: Eliminates data latency – growers get actionable insights the next morning.
- **Cross-crop versatility**: Already serving apples, grapes, blueberries, cherries, almonds, pistachios, and citrus, with rapid expansion.
- **Massive dataset**: Billions of fruit images across millions of trees, enabling unique AI models for yield prediction, health assessment, and autonomous decision-making.
- **Deep integration**: FruitScope OS connects with existing farm tools and workflows, becoming a system-of-record.

## Strategic Focus
- **Expand crop coverage**: Adding new crops every season (recently strawberries).
- **Move from data to action**: Building Canary AI to automate decisions (pruning, spraying, irrigation, harvest scheduling) and eventually control farm machinery.
- **Scale operations**: Targeting large-acreage farms with consistent pricing and discounts, while growing the US-based support and engineering team.
- **IP & hardware moat**: Continued investment in patents and durable in-field hardware.

## Why Work Here
- **Mission-driven work**: Direct impact on food supply, sustainability, and farm profitability.
- **Cutting-edge tech stack**: Combines computer vision, edge AI, robotics, and cloud software on real-world hardware.
- **High-growth environment**: 207% headcount growth in a year; small team (~32 people) means ownership and visibility.
- **Open roles**: Machine learning engineers, robotics software engineers (perception & localization), full-stack engineers, field operations technicians, and customer success (Spanish speaker).
- **Remote/hybrid**: Headquarters in Ithaca, NY (alternative location Seattle), with field operations in California (San Luis Obispo, Santa Maria, Central Valley). Engineering likely open to remote, but some roles are location-specific.
- **Culture**: “World-class support,” “built for farmers,” in-field training provided free to growers; emphasis on practical, durable hardware and software.

## Sources
1. [orchard.ai](https://www.orchard.ai/)
2. [careers.orchard-robotics.com](https://careers.orchard-robotics.com/)
3. [CBInsights – Orchard Robotics](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/orchard-robotics)
4. [LinkedIn – Orchard](https://www.linkedin.com/company/orchardrobotics)
5. [TechCrunch – Series A raise](https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/03/orchard-robotics-founded-by-a-thiel-fellow-cornell-dropout-raises-22m-for-farm-vision-ai/)

## Other roles at Orchard Robotics

- [Senior Enterprise Account Executive [Brazil]](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-enterprise-account-executive-brazil-orchard-robotics-brazil-g7xnd6ds8rvv) — Brazil
- [Sales Operations Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/sales-operations-engineer-orchard-robotics-san-francisco-5wq6xbaz9fdh) — San Francisco, CA
- [Senior Full Stack Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-full-stack-software-engineer-orchard-robotics-san-francisco-07e3qdq4d5sn) — San Francisco, CA
- [Director of Manufacturing Operations & Factory](https://feeny.ai/job/director-of-manufacturing-operations-factory-orchard-robotics-san-francisco-68vsjhqjbqtj) — San Francisco, CA
- [Director of Finance & RevOps](https://feeny.ai/job/director-of-finance-revops-orchard-robotics-san-francisco-1vdedr2c4k2s) — San Francisco, CA
- [Senior Enterprise Account Executive [Italy]](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-enterprise-account-executive-italy-orchard-robotics-italy-x0z11jn8vwwp) — Italy
- [Senior Enterprise Account Executive [Spain]](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-enterprise-account-executive-spain-orchard-robotics-spain-akwa455mfbx5) — Spain
- [Senior Enterprise Account Executive [South Africa]](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-enterprise-account-executive-south-africa-orchard-robotics-south-africa-7mpqnrp34rmq) — South Africa
- [Senior Enterprise Account Executive [Australia]](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-enterprise-account-executive-australia-orchard-robotics-australia-p9hd93e8cggc) — Australia
- [Senior Enterprise Account Executive [Peru]](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-enterprise-account-executive-peru-orchard-robotics-peru-d97ac9xqp7h5) — Peru