Bactery
Embedded System Engineer
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Location: Science Creates OMX, Bristol, UK
Employment type: Full-time, permanent
Salary: Competitive, dependent on experience
Start date: Immediate (depending on notice period)
Build one of the world's most energy-efficient embedded platforms.
Bactery makes electricity from soil. Our bacteria-powered batteries harness naturally occurring soil bacteria to provide reliable, maintenance-free power - anywhere, at any time.
Our technology is already powering real-world deployments across the UK. We're now looking for an Embedded Systems Engineer to build the ultra-low-power electronics and firmware that will transform this breakthrough into products deployed around the world.
Role mission
This isn't a role maintaining an established embedded product. It's an opportunity to help invent one.
You'll become the technical owner of Bactery's embedded platform, bringing together electronics, firmware, energy harvesting, power management, and wireless communications into systems capable of operating autonomously in the field for years.
You'll solve problems that few embedded engineers ever encounter: designing around a biological and variable energy source, extracting value from limited power budgets, and building electronics that must operate reliably underground and in remote environments with little to no maintenance.
The right person will combine strong embedded systems expertise with a practical startup mindset: rigorous enough to build reliable products, pragmatic enough to keep moving, and commercially aware enough to understand that field performance always beats lab elegance.
You'll work directly alongside our founders, combining your embedded systems expertise with Bactery's unique microbial energy technology. You'll have the freedom to propose new architectures, build prototypes, test ideas in the field, and help shape one of the world's most energy-efficient IoT platforms.
What you'll own
- Own the architecture and development of Bactery's embedded platform across electronics, firmware, energy harvesting, power management, and system integration.
- Drive the transition from working prototypes to reliable, manufacturable, and commercially deployable products.
- Design ultra-low-power electronic systems, including schematic capture, PCB layout, component selection, prototyping, and hardware debugging.
- Develop robust embedded firmware in C/C++ for low-power microcontrollers, designed to operate unattended in the field for years.
- Design intelligent energy-harvesting and power-management systems around Bactery's bacteria-powered batteries.
- Integrate sensors and third-party devices with Bactery's technology, enabling our systems to fit cleanly into the platforms and infrastructure already used by our customers and partners.
- Develop wireless connectivity using technologies such as LoRaWAN, NB-IoT, LTE-M, BLE, or similar communication standards.
- Take embedded products from early-stage concepts through prototyping, validation, and production, balancing performance with manufacturability, scalability, reliability, and cost.
- Design and execute rigorous laboratory and field validation programs to identify system limitations, failure modes, and opportunities for optimization.
- Generate the technical evidence needed to support engineering decisions, product development, grant delivery, IP generation, and customer validation.
- Help define Bactery's embedded technology roadmap as the company grows.
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What we're looking for
Essential experience
- A degree in Electrical & Electronics Engineering, Embedded Systems, Computer Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
- Experience developing embedded systems through industrial, commercial, or applied R&D.
- Strong electronic design skills, including schematic capture, PCB design, component selection, and hardware debugging.
- Strong embedded software development skills in C/C++.
- Experience designing low-power embedded systems where energy efficiency is a fundamental design constraint.
- Experience integrating electronics, firmware, sensors, and communications into complete working systems.
- Familiarity with wireless communication technologies such as LoRaWAN, NB-IoT, LTE-M, BLE, or similar.
- Confidence designing tests, interpreting data, and making engineering decisions based on evidence rather than opinion.
- A practical engineering mindset and the ability to balance technical performance with reliability, manufacturability, scalability, and cost.
- The ability to communicate technical ideas clearly and work effectively within a multidisciplinary team.
- Comfortable working in a fast-moving startup where priorities evolve, ambiguity is normal, and everyone is expected to take ownership.
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Nice to have
- Experience developing low-power energy-harvesting systems.
- Experience designing power-management or battery-management electronics.
- Experience taking hardware products from prototype through design for manufacture and production.
- Experience with environmental sensing, remote monitoring, or autonomous field-deployed devices.
- Experience with microcontroller platforms such as STM32, Nordic Semiconductor, Microchip, Texas Instruments, or similar.
- Experience working with RTOS-based or event-driven embedded architectures.
- Experience in a startup, university spin-out, hardware, IoT, energy, or climate-tech company.
You don't need to meet every desirable requirement. We care most about your ability to solve difficult engineering problems, learn quickly, and take ownership of outcomes.
How we work
- Build for the real world. Design experiments that improve products, not just publications. Field reality always beats laboratory elegance.
- Scientific rigor. Startup pace. Move quickly, learn quickly, but never compromise the quality of science and engineering.
- Reality always wins. Follow the data - even when it challenges your assumptions. Negative results are still progress if they help us make better decisions.
- Own the outcome. Take responsibility for your work, your decisions, and the quality of what you deliver. If something needs fixing, step up and fix it.
- Be respectful. Stay curious. Leave your ego at the door. Challenge ideas constructively, and support your teammates.
Why join Bactery?
Most engineering roles involve making existing products slightly better. This isn't one of them.
At Bactery, you'll help build an entirely new class of energy technology from the ground up. You'll design electronics powered by living soil, develop ultra-low-power systems capable of operating for years without maintenance, and see your work deployed across farms, infrastructure, and remote environments.
You'll have the freedom to experiment, the responsibility to deliver, and the opportunity to become one of the leading engineers working at the intersection of energy harvesting and ultra-low-power IoT.
The engineering challenges aren't solved yet. That's exactly why we're hiring.
If you want to spend the next few years building products nobody has built before, we'd love to hear from you.
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