Director of Engineering - Industrial Systems & Product Platform Development (United States)

Pacific Search Firm has been retained by our client, a growing leader in the green industrial gas space, to find their first Director of Engineering — Industrial Systems & Product Platform Development

Our client is rebuilding carbon dioxide supply for reliability.

Problem: North America's CO₂ supply is shrinking and it's already fragile.

CO₂ has always been a byproduct, not a product captured from refineries, ethanol plants, and chemical plants that were never built with CO₂ customers in mind. That feedstock dependency means supply is heavily centralized in the middle of the country, leaving coastal and western markets to rely on expensive, inefficient, and failure-prone rail shipments from a handful of mega-plants.

Our client’s solution: Our client is developing a network of small-scale production facilities that recover biogenic carbon dioxide from renewable natural gas operations and convert it into beverage-grade liquid CO₂. By locating production close to regional demand, aiming to create a more reliable and resilient alternative to the traditional long-distance CO₂ supply model.

Our client is hiring its first Director of Engineering — Industrial Systems & Product Platform Development to define the engineering foundation of the company’s industrial physical product platform from the ground up. Reporting directly to the COO, you'll own the design requirements, systems architecture, and technical baseline for every future carbon dioxide production unit, turning lessons from the company’s first plant into a repeatable playbook, then build the internal engineering team to execute it.

The Technology: Our client's carbon dioxide production units recover CO₂ from renewable natural gas upgrading facilities and purify and liquefy it to beverage-grade quality — integrating compression, purification, refrigeration, instrumentation, and controls into a compact, standardized platform. Our client's edge isn't inventing proprietary equipment; it's owning the system architecture, requirements, and technical baseline that turn best-in-class components into one coherent, continuously-improving product.

The company’s initial facilities provide the operating data; now the job is separating what should stay standard from what should evolve, and building the internal ownership to do that systematically as our client scales to dozens of sites.

Key Responsibilities:

1. Systems Engineering & Physical Platform Architecture: Personally define and maintain the mechanical, electrical, and process engineering architecture and requirements that govern the company's standardized carbon dioxide production unit platform.
2. Product Development & Systems Integration: Lead the multidisciplinary engineering effort that develops the product against that architecture and integrates the individual disciplines into a coherent system. Direct and integrate work performed across process, mechanical, refrigeration, controls, electrical, instrumentation, analytical, software and other engineering disciplines
3. Engineering Foundation & Organization: Build the technical governance, processes, and internal/partner engineering capability required to develop and continuously improve Alchemy's platform.
4. Productization & Continuous Improvement: Ensure that every deployment strengthens the product platform.

What We’re Looking For:

We’re looking for a player-coach who wants to build both establish technical ownership of a complex multidisciplinary industrial platform and the engineering team behind it. The strongest candidates bring:

• Systems Judgment — balances safety, performance, cost, and schedule; optimizes the whole system, not the parts.
• Product Mindset — builds repeatable platforms, not one-off projects.
• Technical Depth — deep expertise in one discipline, broadened into systems leadership.
• Builder’s Ownership — creates what doesn’t yet exist; takes initiative without waiting for structure.
• Player-Coach Leadership — moves between architecture and people leadership; leads through credibility, not hierarchy.

Experience and Qualifications:

• 12-15+ years of progressive product design engineering experience, including meaningful time at a Director, Chief Engineer, or Principal Engineer level of technical ownership over complex industrial, process, or multidisciplinary physical systems (which could include: packaged equipment, or other multidisciplinary physical systems integrating technologies such as mechanical equipment, compression, thermal/refrigeration systems, process equipment, electrical systems, instrumentation, and industrial automation/controls.)
• 3+ years in a direct people-leadership role — hiring, developing, and managing engineers across multiple disciplines and technical staff, not just leading projects or coordinating contractors.
• Full ownership of the technical architecture of a physical product or industrial platform for a complex industrial product or platform — final technical authority over design requirements, design architecture, and design tradeoffs from concept through commercial deployment.
• Experience taking a first-of-a-kind (FOAK) product to a repeatable, multi-site platform — translating lessons from one working commercial unit into a standardized design and a playbook others can execute against.
• Experience building or scaling an engineering function — determining what to hire, contract, or outsource, and standing up the team, process, and technical governance from a low base.
• Direct experience leading through ambiguity at an early-stage or resource-constrained company, defining the technical roadmap without an established organization behind you.
• Experience leading contractors, suppliers, and engineering partners through technical credibility, including full accountability for their output.
• Comfort communicating technical strategy, risk, and tradeoffs to a COO, CEO, or board-level audience.
• Experience owning technical scope and budget for multi-million-dollar capital programs, including direct negotiation with equipment vendors and OEMs.
• A bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, or hard physical sciences; advanced degrees valued but not required.

Nice to haves:

• Controls and industrial automation engineering, including controls architecture, functional requirements, PLC/HMI systems, instrumentation, or commissioning.
• Experience selecting or implementing engineering infrastructure such as requirements-management, PLM/PDM, configuration-management, or document-control systems.
• Experience with modular industrial systems, packaged equipment, industrial gases, or refrigeration technologies.

Position Details:

Start: Q4 2026

Location: Remote within the United States, with some travel to company facilities, suppliers, engineering partners, and future project sites.

Compensation: $180,000 - $250,000, full benefits, equity

Reporting: Reports directly to the Chief Operating Officer (COO).

Travel: Approximately 30% travel during the first 12–18 months.