Senior Chemical Engineer - Electrolyzer

Terraform Industries is an early-stage green tech start-up. Our team has worked on everything from the Space Shuttle to aircraft fuel safety to GPS science. We’re backed by Patrick Collison (co-founder of Stripe) and Nat Friedman (Chairman of GitHub). 

We have the most absurdly brain-meltingly ambitious technical challenge imaginable. 

Gigascale atmospheric hydrocarbon synthesis. 

We’re going to make natural gas out of sunlight and air. Our waste products are oxygen and water. As solar power gets cheaper, there will come a time when it is cheaper to get carbon from the atmosphere than an oil well. That time is now.

Our goal is to methodically displace oil and gas drilling as the preferred cheapest, easiest method of obtaining billions of tonnes of hydrocarbons. The success condition is driving the net flux of carbon from the crust to the atmosphere down by an order of magnitude, as quickly as possible. Like, by 2035. Every year we delay costs us another 50 GT of CO2 in the atmosphere, so we’re well motivated. 

We want you!

Are you mechanically intuitive? Do you want to help solve climate change? Do you like working on big hardware projects? Terraform Industries is hiring motivated, self-directed people to build our development prototype platform.

As a member of the Terraform Industries team, you will take on broad responsibilities for design, prototyping, test, tooling, and iterative improvement. Our roles are multifunctional and grow with the org. The ideal candidate should have insight, intuition, experience with mechanical systems, excellent communication skills, ambition, and execution capacity. 

Competencies

• Insight. You need to understand the problem in a way that leads naturally to solutions.
• Intuition. Mechanical systems are friends.
• Autonomy. You understand the problem and you solve it while managing your own tooling, team, budget, schedule, and interfaces.
• Integrity. Our mission is on the cusp of the physically possible, so there is no margin for faking.
• Low drama. You reliably avoid, curtail, and prevent avoidable interpersonal issues, while actively contributing to building a great culture.
• Execution capacity. You have a track record of getting things done.
• Urgency. You wake up knowing each day we waste costs us 100 million tonnes of CO2.

Mission

You will be the Senior Chemical Engineer within the Electrolyzer Team reporting to the Director of Research and Development.

Responsibilities

In service of this goal, the successful candidate will:

• Perform research and design work.
• Personally lead fabrication efforts using generic hand and power tools and in-house tooling.
• Manage supplier, contractor, and customer relationships.
• Lead recruitment efforts for their team, and actively contribute to team career development.
• Demonstrate serviceable functionality of the prototype by achieving system performance targets.
• Participate in design reviews and other business functions across the company.

Logistics

Location - Terraform Industries is based in the castle building in Burbank, near Los Angeles, California. There are gargoyles. Work is in person on site. Our facility is very well ventilated, and all our people (you included) are maximally vaccinated/boosted against COVID-19.

Remuneration/benefits - Terraform Industries is proud to offer a competitive benefits package including: equity, 401k, health, dental, and vision insurance, and flexible time off.

Terraform Industries is an Equal Opportunity Employer; employment with Terraform Industries is governed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications and will not be influenced in any manner by race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability or any other legally protected status.

Apply

Either respond to this posting or send to recruiting@terraformindustries.com a one pager with your best evidence of execution ability. If you have YouTube or github links, please include them, as we will appreciate your work. Your one pager could be a resume but it could also be a description of a relevant project you completed. Generic resumes have low SNR.

Not sure if you’re a fit? Send us an application anyway. 

Think we’ve made a fundamental technical error? We’d love to hear about it.