Chemical Process Engineer (Charleston-Huntington Area)

Are you a Chemical Engineering graduate who is tired of entry level postings that quietly ask for five years of experience?

Position Summary

Most first engineering jobs hand you a spreadsheet and tell you to wait your turn. This one hands you a process.

We are a specialty chemical manufacturer in Douglas, Georgia, taking customer processes from technology transfer all the way through full plant production. We have two Process Engineer seats open on a small, tight-knit engineering team, and we are hiring people who want ownership early instead of five years from now.

This is a hands-on role with real responsibility from the start. You will own an assigned process end to end: the technical work, the plant execution, the materials that keep it running, and the reporting that goes back to the customer. Expect your week to break into roughly thirds. A third in meetings, reports, and spreadsheets for customers. A third building work instructions and moving your process forward. A third out in the plant with operators, looking at the process where it actually runs.

Key Responsibilities

• Take ownership of an assigned process, including batch tracking, work instructions, day-to-day execution, and making sure the raw materials are purchased and on hand.
• Translate customer technology transfer packages into processes that run at plant scale, working through lab, kilo lab, and pilot plant stages.
• Partner with operators, maintenance, and production personnel on the plant floor to troubleshoot live process issues and make procedures usable where the work happens.
• Develop draft block flow diagrams, mass and energy balances, and specifications for raw materials and in-process samples.
• Build cost models for new processes and evaluate profitability before they reach the floor.
• Support Process Safety Management activities, process hazard reviews, CPI practices, and regulatory work including PMN submissions.
• Communicate directly with internal teams and external customers, from operators on the floor to customer leadership.

Qualifications

• B.S. in Chemical Engineering. Recent graduates with internship or co-op experience are strongly encouraged to apply and are considered on equal footing.
• 0 to 5 years of process engineering, process development, or manufacturing experience.
• Solid applied engineering fundamentals: mass and energy balances, unit operations, and basic process economics. You should be genuinely comfortable with the math.
• The communication skills to work with an operator in the plant one hour and a customer VP the next.
• A self-starter who takes instruction well, asks questions when something is unclear, and does not need daily management to move work forward.
• Dedication and reliability. This is a small team where one person carrying their weight is visible, and so is the opposite.
• Willingness to be on call nights and weekends for your assigned process.

Experience in batch processing is especially relevant here and tends to shorten the ramp. Exposure to scale-up, technology transfer, Process Safety Management, and process cost analysis is highly valued. An MS, MBA, PhD, or PE is welcome and not required.

We offer a base salary starting at $75,000, with room above that for candidates who bring directly relevant experience, plus a target annual bonus of 5% to 10%. Benefits begin on your first day of hire. You also get two weeks of vacation, five sick days per year, and after one year, entry into our safe harbor 401(k) where the company automatically contributes 3% whether or not you contribute anything yourself.

This role is fully on-site, Monday through Friday, roughly 8 to 5, with on-call responsibility for your process at nights and on weekends. Travel is rare, two to four times a year at most. We are hiring locally for these openings and are not offering relocation at this time.

Two seats are open, and this is a place where people actually grow. Our current General Manager started here as a new graduate and worked her way up. If you want your first engineering job to be an actual engineering job, this is the one.