Staff Mechanical Engineer

The Role We are an early-stage startup, and this is a foundational hire. We are looking for an engineer to own the design of novel chemical reactors, taking them from concept through to Code-stamped hardware running in the field. Our reactors handle flammable gases at high pressure and moderate temperatures (200 to 400°C).

The central challenges are heat management, materials and joining, and pressure vessel qualification under ASME Section VIII, Division 1, all at a cost that works for commercial deployment. You will choose among competing design approaches and carry the best one into production. What matters most to us is how you work.

The problems here are not fully defined, the answers are not in a handbook, and nobody will hand you a finished spec. We need someone who takes full ownership of outcomes, who treats an open question as something to go settle rather than wait on, and who is as comfortable running a coupon test or calling a fabricator as building a model.

The requirements below describe the shape of the job, not a checklist. If you have owned hard hardware problems end to end and can show it, we want to hear from you even if your experience doesn’t match line for line.

What You Will Do

pressure boundary, internals, headers and manifolds, catalyst handling, flow distribution, and integration into modular skids. Lead design selection. Evaluate competing architectures on heat transfer, manufacturability, Code path and cost, and settle on designs in time for each build. Own the ASME Code path. Take designs through ASME Section VIII, Division 1, including non-welded construction where it applies.

Be our main technical contact with the Authorized Inspector and fabricators’ quality programs. Develop and qualify joining procedures (brazing and welding) under ASME Section IX, with coupon programs, metallography, and burst and leak testing. Run thermal and structural analysis: thermal stress, cycling and fatigue, and pressure loading, tied to our process, kinetics and CFD models.

Own materials selection and compatibility for hydrogen, CO and other flammable gases, steam, and catalysts. Design for safe operation with flammable gas at pressure: relief, containment, leak detection, and hazard reviews (HAZOP) alongside the process team. Build the supply chain: material suppliers, finishing and forming vendors, braze shops and pressure vessel fabricators, domestic and international.

Write the specs and drawings they build to. Take prototypes from drawing to test: coupons, prototype modules, pressure and leak testing, and instrumented testing on process gas. Design for scale. Carry designs from demonstration units to commercial modules built the same way in quantity, with cost treated as a primary design parameter.

What You Bring The first two are non-negotiable. The rest is the experience we expect will help most, but we will trade depth in one area for strength in another and for the right mindset. Ownership. You take responsibility for the whole outcome, not just your piece of it. When something is blocked, unclear, or outside your lane, you go figure it out.

A problem-solving mentality. You break hard, ambiguous problems into questions you can answer, and you answer them with a hand calculation, a test, a phone call, or a model, whichever gets you there fastest. You are comfortable moving with incomplete information and revising as you learn. A record of taking hardware from concept through fabrication, test and operation, not just analysis.

Experience designing and delivering pressure equipment, ideally reactors or compact heat exchangers for flammable or high-pressure gas service. Experience getting equipment through ASME Section VIII, Division 1, including working directly with an Authorized Inspector. Experience with brazed, diffusion-bonded or other non-welded construction is a strong plus.

Experience developing and qualifying brazing or welding procedures under Section IX. A solid grounding in metallurgy and materials selection for high-pressure, elevated-temperature gas service, including joint failure modes. Proficiency in thermal-structural FEA (ANSYS, Abaqus or equivalent) and in heat transfer analysis.

You should be comfortable carrying a problem from a hand calculation all the way to a detailed model. Willingness to be hands-on in the lab and on the shop floor. A degree in Mechanical Engineering or a related field, or equivalent experience. An MS or PhD is valued but not required.

Nice to Have

Experience with Fischer-Tropsch, methanol or other strongly exothermic catalytic reactors, especially packed-bed or microchannel designs. Experience with boiling-water or two-phase cooled equipment. Familiarity with electroplating, photochemical machining, stamping or roll forming of thin sheet. Experience qualifying equipment for hydrogen or CO service.

Experience managing international fabrication vendors. Prior work at a hardware startup or on a first-of-a-kind process plant.