Product Development Engineer (Startup Agritech)

Product Development Engineer

An early build role at a fast-moving Exeter deep-tech startup

Location: Exeter, UK (hybrid — lab/workshop-based for build and test work, with flexibility for desk-based work from home)

Contract: Permanent. Full Time / Part Time (flexible)

Salary: £35,000–£55,000 + equity options (dependent upon experience)

Benefits: 3% employer pension contribution, 25 days holiday + bank holidays

About Viridys

Agriculture and food is the value chain that keeps us alive… but right now, it's underserving both human health and the environment. Too much is lost to pests, disease and waste, and too many decisions along that chain are still made on guesswork rather than good information. We think that's fixable.

We're an Exeter-based biotech startup building biological sensors that give growers and the wider food chain the insight to act early: a passive device that changes colour in the presence of the volatile compounds plants and produce release when they're under stress. Done right, that means less waste, lower costs, fewer chemicals, and a more resilient food system.

We raised our pre-seed earlier this year and secured significant grant funding to build our first operational prototype. We're now looking for someone to join our team who believes in what we're building and why - and wants to help us turn that vision into a reality.

This is a rare opportunity to join an innovative, up-and-coming deep-tech company at a pivotal early stage, as an early hire with real scope to shape both the product and the business as we grow - and share in that upside through equity in the company.

The role

This role takes sensing biology from the lab to a physical product - operating in commercial contexts, from glasshouses to stores and packing lines. As our Product Development Engineer you'll run device development end to end; working with growers, packers and operational partners to understand what the device needs to do in the real world; selecting and characterising materials; designing and building prototypes; proving they perform under real environmental conditions; and getting them manufactured at batch scale.

It's a hands-on build role in a small team, with real ownership of the engineering decisions. We're looking for someone who can lean into the wider business need and is happy to “muck in” if the moment calls for it, not just work strictly to a fixed brief.

In 12–18 months, success looks like: you'll have taken the device from lab bench to a batch-manufactured, field-tested prototype - validated in simulated environments and ready to support our operational pilots and our next funding round.

What you'll do

• Get in front of growers, packers and operational partners to understand how the device needs to perform in the real world and use that to shape the design, not just validate it

• Characterise candidate materials and select what works

• Design and build prototypes, and iterate them

• Test performance across environmental conditions to establish what the device can promise in the field

• Take designs through to small-batch manufacture, working with an external manufacturer

• Support trials and feed results back into the design

What you'll bring

Level of experience and “fit” matter more to us than the specific qualification. A PhD with some independent R&D or engineering experience, or a Master's or Bachelor's with an equivalent level of hands-on experience gained in industry or academia would be ideal. More than anything, we're looking for someone hungry and excited to build something that matters - and help shape the business, not just do a job within it.

Essential

• A background in materials science, polymer science, biophysics, mechanical engineering or device/product engineering. A multidisciplinary background spanning more than one of these is particularly welcome

• Comfortable working autonomously in a small team with limited infrastructure. Setting up your own rigs, and working closely with the synthetic biology team

• Experience designing and running characterisation experiments across multiple variables. Specifying and interpreting a test matrix, not just executing one someone else produced

• Willing and able to work directly with growers, packers and operational partners - gathering requirements from the real world and translating them into a design brief

• Practical fabrication skills across techniques such as CAD, 3D printing or other ALM, CNC, or laser cutting

• Demonstrated ability to solve unfamiliar problems from first principles

Desirable

• Surface or polymer science: sorption, partitioning, barrier properties, wetting

• Experience with timed-release, controlled-activation or moisture-triggered mechanisms

• Knowledge of, or experience working with, laminar flow devices, microfluidics, medical monitoring devices or similar

• Experience specifying and managing an external manufacturer, and scaling from lab prototype to small-batch manufacture (tens to hundreds of units)

• Diagnostics, sensors, packaging or agri-tech hardware

• Field-deployed product development where environmental robustness is a hard requirement

We're looking for the right person to join the team, not necessarily the perfect one on paper. We know great candidates can be easily lost in the gap between a CV and a job description. If you don't tick every box above but can show you learn fast and solve problems, we'd still like to hear from you!

How you'll work

• Build-and-test, not research-and-publish. The deliverable is working units, on schedule

• Alongside the CTO, academic partners on the biology, and operational partners on what actually survives real-world deployment

• Part of the project reports against Innovate UK milestones, so a grant-funded delivery cadence: real deadlines, defined deliverables, quarterly reporting

• We're a small, early-stage team - everyone's role stretches beyond its job description sometimes. We value people who pitch in on the wider business need, not just their own patch

To apply

Please submit your CV and a short covering letter via this link by 01 November 2026. In your covering letter, please confirm your right to work in the UK and your current notice period, and tell us what draws you to Viridys and this role — we're more interested in that than a generic template.

We want this to be a genuinely open, inclusive process that's accessible to everyone. If you need any reasonable adjustments at any stage of the application, just let us know in the covering letter.

Our process for selected candidates is an informal chat, followed by a practical exercise based on a real problem we're working on and a conversation with the team. We'll move quickly and keep you updated at every stage.

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