Founding Research Engineer

Headcount: 1

Job Details

• Experience: 0–8 years
• Salary: Not specified
• Equity: Competitive equity
• Visa sponsorship: H-1B, O-1, OPT
• Employment type: Full-time
• Work type: In person

Benefits & Perks

• Health insurance
• Gym membership
• Lunch and dinner provided daily

About This Role

We are hiring our second Founding Engineer. You will report directly to the CEO and work closely with the first Founding Engineer. This role combines technical depth with forward-deployed ownership. You will take full ownership of client projects, working directly with customers and partners to understand their problems and deliver solutions. The company’s founders handle sales and sourcing, so your customer work will focus on solving problems and gathering information, not selling.

The near-term focus is information gathering and applied optimization work with industrial clients. Over the coming months, the role will shift toward deeper research. We are looking for someone who can take on scrappy, client-facing problems now and grow into research-level work later. This role suits someone with a research background in materials science, physics, chemistry, or an adjacent field who wants to own outcomes on a small, high-intensity, fully in-person team. The office is in North Beach, San Francisco. The schedule is six days a week: 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday and noon to 6 p.m. on Saturdays.

What You’ll Own

• Own client projects with construction and mining companies end to end, from scoping problems to delivering solutions.
• Communicate directly with clients and partners to gather information, understand operational constraints, and define problems to solve.
• Design and build solutions to applied optimization problems in materials and industrial settings.
• Collaborate closely with the first Founding Engineer on technical direction and shared problems.
• Grow into the company’s core research work as it moves from client-driven information gathering toward deeper materials science research.

Requirements

• Research experience in materials science, physics, chemistry, or an adjacent STEM field, such as graduate research, lab work, computational research, or publications.
• Comfort owning client-facing work end to end: communicating directly with customers and partners, gathering information, and driving projects to completion.
• Engineering ability to turn research knowledge into working solutions for real-world optimization problems.
• An action-oriented, resourceful approach and a track record of solving well-defined problems in unstructured environments where the path is not laid out.
• Excitement about working in a close-knit team on the stated schedule: 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday and noon to 6 p.m. on Saturdays.