Director of Product Development Engineering

Dandelion is hiring a Director of Product Development Engineering with a proven track record of successfully leading Product Development teams as a ‘player-coach’. The chosen candidate will be responsible for managing successful outcomes for all of Dandelion’s new product development programs. We want a results-driven individual who thrives building and executing on products, and roadmaps. This person’s past experience should demonstrate she or he can partner closely with management to build and successfully deliver a hardware product to customers, ideally from scratch (or close to it). This person should be located in the Somerville area and work hands-on in the lab, brainstorming and working through ideas and ultimately leading the engineering team to successfully develop new lines of heat pump products. It is critical that this person has successfully built and launched a real hardware product to real customers. We are not interested in a researcher. Instead, we need someone maniacally focused on delivering a high quality hardware product on time. This person should be an experienced mechanical engineer in addition to possessing a broad technical understanding across many domains. They should have an extensive track record of working successfully with teams of hardware engineers.

Key Responsibilities

• Concrete experience building a product, or a new version of an existing product, more or less from scratch
• Experience bringing new products to market, from idea to prototype to pilot to scale
• An ability to get into the details, but also craft the strategy and manage roadmap
• Highly organized and adept at managing trade offs, allocating resources, and predicting and meeting budgets and timelines
• Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering or related field (Masters Degree preferred)
• 10+ years experience driving electromechanical equipment project build efforts
• Solid understanding of electrical systems as well as familiarity with control systems integration
• SolidWorks and SolidWorks PDM
• Create and drive quality metrics and studies (Fault Tree/FMEA)
• Drive designs for Manufacturing and Operations Engineering - e.g. Process capability Cpk, Tolerancing

About You

• Strength in creating product development plans, allocating engineering resources, creating budgets and schedules for new product development efforts
• A strong communicator: a successful candidate will be able to get to the heart of issues across technical domains, drive to clarity, and communicate well to both engineers and management
• Ability to manage and drive engineering build schedules with external manufacturing partners
• A track record of developing and launching products on time and on budget
• Experience developing electro-mechanical products for residential or industrial applications
• Experience in smaller companies and venture backed companies
• Experience with physical goods and contract manufacturing
• Experienced with product development schedules, and anticipating risks

Key Attributes

• Be a ‘player-coach’ able to assist in design tasks
• Conduct regular design reviews against requirements and metrics with the Dandelion team and also with the External Manufacturing teams
• Drive design efforts to maximize DF* and quality metrics
• Expertise in hardware design ‘best practices’ processes and metrics
• Experience identifying and managing preferred suppliers with manufacturing partners

Bonus Skills

• Refrigeration or HVAC design and manufacturing
• Sheet metal enclosure design
• Pumping and fluid handling systems design
• Temperature control systems
• Thermal systems design
• Guidance for safety/agency certifications (UL, ETL, etc.)
• Reliability assessment

Benefits/Perks

• Health/Dental/Vision insurance
• 401k plan
• Stock/Equity options
• Paid Sick and Vacation time (PTO)
• 40-hour workweek, overtime available
• Training support including on-the-job and virtual/online-based courses

You’ll love working at Dandelion because:

We’re solving the world’s hardest problems. You’ll have the opportunity to pioneer renewable heating and cooling from the ground-up (literally). There’s no established playbook for fighting climate change, so your work will be messy, challenging, and build a better, cleaner world.

We’re good people. It sounds simple, and it is. We are passionate, vision-driven, low-ego, and treat one another with kindness and respect. We challenge ideas here, not people.

We hold each other accountable. We celebrate our wins and learn from our losses. We’re honest, realistic, and transparent across all areas of the business, every day -- not just at our monthly all-hands meeting.

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Since spinning out of Google X in 2017, Dandelion Energy has been an energy innovation company working to electrify home heating. We create and install geothermal heat pumps to replace fossil-fueled furnaces and boilers. We’ve grown into an organization of over 100 employees and have become the largest residential geothermal heat pump installation company in the United States. Our carbon impact to date is the equivalent to taking over 25,000 cars off the road... and that impact is accelerating with our growth!

Our cross-disciplinary team consists of experts in geothermal, drilling, heat pump software engineering, HVAC installation, solar and solar financing, behavioral economics, and high-growth operations amongst other backgrounds. With the potential to catalyze and scale a widespread transition to sustainable and affordable heating and cooling, our work is both complex yet rewarding. We are working to create a wholesale shift in how people heat and cool their homes — join us!