Principal Process Engineer - Water

VVater is America’s Next Water Company, delivering the future of purification through its award-winning Farady Reactor (CES Best of Innovation 2025, World Future Award 2025, Time Best Invention Award 2025), proprietary ALTEP (Advanced Low Tension Electroporation Process), Advanced Dissolved Air Flotation, and Micro & Nano Bubble technologies. Unlike outdated chemical, filter, and membrane systems, VVater’s electric-field breakthroughs eliminate PFAS, microplastics, microorganisms, and other contaminants with record retention times, without toxic byproducts or costly consumables.

With over 4.3B gallons treated and validation from global leaders, VVater is scaling into municipal drinking water and wastewater, DPR/IPR, onsite reuse for data centers, commercial buildings, and resorts, residential purification, and consumer health water, delivering a 60% smaller footprint, 40% CapEx savings, 80% OpEx savings, and 40% less energy use.

Job Description:

THIS IS AN ONSITE POSITION BASED IN AUSTIN, TEXAS - NO REMOTE OR HYBRID AVAILABILITY FOR THIS POSITION

The Process Engineer is the technical owner of VVater's treatment system designs. You will take a customer's raw water (or wastewater) characterization, the regulatory target, and the operating constraints, and you will design the entire system that gets from one to the other. Process flow diagrams. Piping and instrumentation diagrams. Mass balances. Hydraulic calculations. Equipment specifications. Bills of materials. Process control narratives.

We will be direct, because that is one of our values. This role is intense. VVater moves at a pace that is uncommon for the water industry. Designs come in fast. Customer deadlines are real. Commissioning happens when it happens, not when your calendar allows. We are not asking for someone to grind for the sake of grinding. We respect personal time when the operating tempo allows. But this is a senior technical seat in a company moving at extraordinary speed, and the right person will be energized by that pace rather than depleted by it. If you want to design one plant a year and watch it slowly grind through permitting for 36 months, this is not your seat. If you want to design across every vertical of the water industry, see your systems built in months, and commission them in the field, this is exactly where you want to be.

Key Responsibilities

• Design complete water and wastewater treatment systems from raw influent through finished water, across drinking water, wastewater, reuse, industrial, onsite, modular, recreational, and residential applications

• Produce process flow diagrams (PFDs), piping and instrumentation diagrams (P&IDs), mass and energy balances, hydraulic profiles, and process control narratives

• Size and specify all major and minor equipment, pumps, blowers, tanks, vessels, electrochemical reactors, ADAF units, instrumentation, valves, piping

• Develop bills of materials (BOMs) and partner with procurement on vendor selection and equipment sourcing

• Perform process modeling and simulation as needed (GPS-X, BioWin, WAVE, IMSDesign, custom spreadsheet and Python models)

• Optimize designs for CapEx, OpEx, footprint, energy, chemical use, and operability

• Design to applicable regulatory standards, EPA SDWA, EPA NPDES, NSF/ANSI 60 and 61, state primacy agency requirements (TCEQ and others), drinking water and wastewater discharge permits

• Support permitting documentation, regulatory submittals, and compliance demonstration testing

• Stay current on emerging regulations, PFAS rules, Lead and Copper Rule revisions, and evolving state DPR/IPR frameworks

• Work directly with the factory floor team to ensure designs are buildable and meet specifications

• Review fabrication, assembly, and FAT (Factory Acceptance Testing) on systems you design

• Travel to commissioning sites; lead or support SAT (Site Acceptance Testing), startup, and performance validation

• Capture lessons learned from the field and feed them back into the design library

• Translate customer requirements into design specifications; lead technical discussions with municipal engineers, consulting firms, industrial process engineers, and end users

• Develop technical proposals, design narratives, and process write-ups that win deals

• Represent VVater technically in RFP responses, pilot studies, and design reviews

• Integrate treatment module unit operations with conventional and advanced processes into a coherent, sized, and buildable system

• Build treatability assessments from first principles: for each contaminant, removal mechanism, and unit operation, give the expected efficacy range with its basis, and state the limiting factors

• Reason feasibility from treatment principles; reserve bench or pilot work for novel chemistry or a target that principles and ranges that are digitally validated

• Quantify performance across contaminants: pathogens, trace organics and CECs, PFAS, nutrients, TOC, dissolved solids, and disinfection and transformation byproducts

• Define the acceptance criteria, instrumentation, and sampling that prove a train meets its target

• Feed design-basis data to the digital-twin and CAD functions, and keep the design basis and the as-modeled system in sync

Qualifications

• Professional Engineer (PE) license — Texas PE strongly preferred, or willingness and ability to obtain Texas licensure

• Master's degree in Environmental, Chemical, Civil or Mechanical (PhD preferred)

• Direct experience designing for Direct Potable Reuse (DPR) or Indirect Potable Reuse (IPR) under Texas, California, or similar state frameworks

• Experience with electrochemical, electrocoagulation, or advanced oxidation processes

• Modular and containerized treatment system design experience

• Industrial water and wastewater experience (food and beverage, semiconductor, data center, oil and gas, mining)

• PFAS treatment design experience

• Familiarity with SCADA, PLC programming concepts, and instrumentation specification

• 7+ years of hands-on water and/or wastewater treatment process engineering experience, with demonstrated breadth across multiple verticals (drinking water, wastewater, reuse, industrial)

• Demonstrated track record of full system design ownership, PFDs, P&IDs, mass balances, hydraulic calcs, equipment sizing, BOMs, across multiple commissioned projects

• Deep working knowledge of conventional and advanced unit processes: coagulation/flocculation, sedimentation, DAF, granular and membrane filtration (MF/UF/NF/RO), biological treatment (activated sludge, MBR, MBBR, IFAS), disinfection (UV, chlorine, ozone), advanced oxidation, ion exchange, electrochemical processes

• Fluency with industry-standard process modeling and design software (e.g., GPS-X, BioWin, WAVE, IMSDesign, ROSA, EPANET)

• AutoCAD proficiency; familiarity with P&ID and PFD drafting conventions (ISA, ANSI)

• Field commissioning experience, you have been on site for startup, not only in the office

• Strong working knowledge of US regulatory frameworks, EPA SDWA, NPDES, NSF/ANSI standards, state primacy requirements (TCEQ especially valued)

• Hands-on fluency with modern AI tools (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, or equivalents); ability to vibe-code internal engineering tools and automations

• Exceptional written and verbal communication; you can write a process design narrative, a technical proposal, and a regulatory submittal with equal clarity

• Comfort with ambiguity, you do not need a senior engineer to walk you through every design

• Strong first-principles command of mass balance, hydraulics, reaction kinetics, and unit-operation sizing

** As a part of our process to ensure a comprehensive evaluation of all applicants, assessment tests are required as part of our recruitment process. Unfortunately, should you elect not to participate in completing the assessment tests, your application will not be able to progress to the next stage or taken into consideration during evaluation.