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Plantible Foods, a venture-backed biology company backed by Astanor Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, Piva Capital, Kellogg's, and Vectr Ventures, is developing next-generation commercial production facilities for sustainable food ingredients. The Upstream Project Engineer will own the engineering and field execution of systems that grow, cultivate, harvest, and deliver Lemna biomass to downstream processing.
You will sit between Plantible's agricultural and process experts and the people designing, supplying, and building facilities. Your scope includes greenhouse structures, cultivation systems, water and nutrient delivery, harvest systems, biomass handling, and supporting utilities and infrastructure. This role is both technical and field-based, requiring you to translate upstream requirements into systems that can be procured, built repeatedly, commissioned, and operated at scale.
Key responsibilities include:
**Connect the Engineering:** Translate requirements from Engineering, R&D, Operations, Maintenance, and Food Safety teams into clear scopes for external partners and vendors. Coordinate multiple disciplines (process, mechanical, piping, civil, structural, electrical, controls, utilities, facility infrastructure). Ensure every system interface has an owner and drive technical decisions to closure. Maintain engineering deliverables, decisions, dependencies, risks, and open items against project schedule. Surface gaps early.
**Develop the Facility:** Support FEL, conceptual design, FEED, and detailed engineering for assigned systems. Coordinate development and review of Basis of Design documents, equipment lists, utility requirements, layouts, specifications, and drawings. Lead design reviews with subject-matter experts, Operations, and external engineers. Challenge designs for safety, constructability, operability, maintainability, hygienic design, cost, and complexity. Translate lessons learned into engineering standards and repeatable design packages for future facilities.
**Buy the Equipment:** Develop technical scopes and bid packages for equipment, materials, and engineered systems. Coordinate RFQs, technical evaluations, bid leveling, and vendor selection. Manage vendor drawings, calculations, data, and documentation. Track major equipment from specification through fabrication, FAT, delivery, installation, and startup. Understand which decisions and long-lead packages drive project schedule.
**Help Build It:** Serve as Plantible's engineering point of contact during construction. Coordinate RFIs, submittals, design clarifications, field changes, and vendor questions. Maintain strong onsite presence during active installation. Resolve conflicts between drawings, equipment, contractors, and requirements. Support quality reviews, mechanical completion, punch lists, system turnover, and documentation closeout.
**Make It Work:** Plan for commissioning and startup before construction is complete. Coordinate vendor startup requirements, FATs, SATs, commissioning, performance testing, and operator training. Work with Operations and Maintenance to ensure systems are documented, tested, safe, and ready to operate. Verify systems achieve required capacity, performance, quality, and reliability. Capture problems and lessons learned for future facilities.
**Requirements:** The posting indicates qualifications are expected but the specific requirements section was omitted from the provided excerpt. Candidates are encouraged to apply even if they do not meet all listed qualifications.
