Project Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

About Us

At Active Surfaces, our mission is bold: to unlock clean energy in places traditional solar can't reach. Our technology, born from nearly a decade of materials science research at MIT, enables ultra-lightweight, flexible solar modules that install on rooftops, walls, and industrial surfaces once considered off-limits. With our platform, the built environment itself becomes a source of clean power.

Since our founding, we've rapidly emerged as one of the most exciting startups in climate tech, merging breakthrough science with advanced manufacturing. Backed by leading global investors and strategic partners — including J-POWER, Sabancı, and Lendlease — and having already deployed a paid pilot with a Fortune 500 partner, we're scaling quickly to support a growing pipeline of deployments and commercial opportunities through 2028.

We're expanding our team to support this next phase of rapid growth. These key hires will join a world-class group with deep expertise in semiconductor and perovskite research, roll-to-roll manufacturing, and commercial leadership across the energy sector.

Let's be direct about what this is. We're a small team taking on a genuinely hard problem—and we hire accordingly. This is a high-intensity, early-stage environment where the pace is fast and the work you do is load-bearing: it directly determines whether we scale or we fail. We look for people who hold themselves to an exceptionally high bar, want deep ownership, and are energized rather than daunted by the ambiguity of tough problems. The work is demanding; the upside—in impact, in career growth, and in equity—is meant to match it. Few people get to materially change whether clean energy reaches places solar never could. If that's the room you want to be in, you'll be surrounded by people who feel the same.

How we work:

• Tackle hard problems first — we front-load the hardest work to minimize wasted iteration cycles and accelerate learning.
• Stay curious and creative — we thrive in ambiguity and push the boundaries of innovation and are always questioning the status quo.
• Thrive on feedback — we use it to grow quickly, as individuals and as a team - to make ourselves and our products better.
• Act today, not tomorrow — we move with urgency and a bias toward action, after all, climate change isn't slowing down.
• Trust the team and be trustworthy — we communicate openly and show up reliably for one another. We strive to make all our contributions perfect so that our peers and colleagues can do the same.

If you hold yourself to that bar and want to shape the future of solar alongside us, we want to meet you.

About the Job

We are going to build a factory. As Project Engineer, you will be the person on the ground making it happen. Today we run a pilot manufacturing line in Woburn. Within the next two years we intend to break ground on our first production facility. Getting there means choosing a site, defining what has to be built, selecting and managing the firms who build it, threading a permitting and incentives process across state and local jurisdictions, and landing our process equipment inside a building that was designed to receive it.

You will not carry that alone. You report to the Founder & CEO, who owns the financing, the final site decision, and the contracts we sign. Your job is everything that gets us to those decisions and everything that happens after them: the analysis, the site visits, the schedules, the drawings, the agencies, the vendors, and the daily grind of turning a plan into a building. You bring him a recommendation with the work behind it. He makes the call. Then you go execute it.

You will also work closely with our CTO and manufacturing team, who own what happens inside the tools. You own everything around them. When our process engineers say the coater needs a given cleanliness class, floor loading, exhaust, and hookup, you are the person who turns that into a basis of design, a specification, and a construction schedule that holds. To be clear about the boundaries: this is not a commercial role and it is not process development. You are not carrying a sales pipeline, and you are not optimizing coating recipes. You own the facility that makes both possible.

This is a first-of-a-kind facility, which means precedent is thin and the decisions compound. We want someone rigorous about scope and schedule, comfortable being the most organized person in the room, and constitutionally unable to accept "it should be fine" as an answer. This role is located full-time on site in Woburn, MA at our Headquarters and Manufacturing Development site, with regular travel to candidate and active project sites.

Responsibilities

• Run the site search. Build the screening model, source and visit candidate sites, gather the power, utility, permitting, workforce, logistics, and incentive data, and assemble the comparison and recommendation the CEO takes to the board.

• Run the EPC selection process. Prepare the bid package, source and qualify bidders, level the bids, coordinate interviews and site walks, and build the recommendation. Once the contract is signed, you are the person managing that contractor day to day.

• Translate manufacturing requirements into a facility basis of design, working with our process and equipment teams: cleanroom classification, HVAC and exhaust, process utilities, chemical storage and handling, floor loading, tool layout, and hookup requirements.

• Manage the owner's engineer and design consultants day to day. Review drawings and specifications, run design reviews, track RFIs and submittals, and hold the engineering scope to what the process actually needs.

• Build and maintain the integrated project schedule and capital budget: critical path, long-lead equipment procurement, contingency, change orders, and the monthly variance report the CEO takes to the board.

• Run permitting, environmental, and regulatory approvals. Assemble the applications, track them through local, state, and federal processes, and serve as the day-to-day point of contact with the agencies.

• Assemble the data packages and applications behind our capital incentives strategy, including federal manufacturing credits and state and utility programs, supporting the CEO, who leads the financing effort.

• Manage tool procurement logistics, factory acceptance testing, delivery, installation, and hookup, and hand a commissioned facility to the manufacturing team ready for process qualification.

• Build the project controls that make all of this legible: vendor qualification, document control, inspection and acceptance procedures, and a reporting cadence that surfaces problems while they are still cheap.

• Be where the work is. Walk the site, sit the OAC meetings, and physically verify that what showed up matches what we specified. A great deal of what goes wrong on a build is visible to the person standing there and invisible to everyone else.

Requirements

• 3-5 years in a high-performance, high-velocity environment: delivering capital projects in industrial construction, project development, owner's engineering, or infrastructure. We will also consider strong candidates from management consulting or fast-paced startups, provided the next requirement is met.
• You have worked on something physical getting built. Siting, design development, permitting, construction, equipment installation, or commissioning. We do not expect you to have delivered a facility end to end at this stage of your career. We do expect you to have carried real scope on a real build and to know what a job site smells like.
• A formal engineering background, or equivalent hands-on depth.
• Fluency with project schedule and cost: you build and defend a CPM schedule, understand critical path and float, track capex against a budget, and manage change orders without losing the plot.
• Contract literacy: you understand the practical differences between design-build, EPC wrap, and construction management, and you know which risks each structure actually transfers.
• Comfort reading engineering documentation: site plans, equipment layouts, one-line diagrams, and specifications. You do not need to produce them, but you must be able to interrogate them.
• Comfort modelling and validating financial analyses.
• Exceptional organization across many parallel workstreams, with a habit of writing things down and closing loops.
• Excellent written and verbal communication. You will move between a contractor's superintendent, a state agency, a tool vendor, and our CEO in the same afternoon.
• Eager to build in ambiguity: this is a first-of-a-kind facility inside an early-stage company, and much of the process does not exist until you build it.
• A strong, almost perfectionist attitude toward process and follow-through.

Bonus Points

• Experience with cleanroom, semiconductor, battery, coatings, or other precision manufacturing facilities.
• Exposure to roll-to-roll or web handling production environments.
• Familiarity with federal manufacturing incentives such as 48C and 45X, or with state and utility economic development programs.
• Permitting experience in Massachusetts or New York.
• Experience with large-load utility interconnection or industrial power procurement.
• PE license, EIT, or a formal engineering background.
• Experience on a first-of-a-kind or scale-up facility, where precedent was thin and the schedule was aggressive anyway.

Performance Bonus

All full-time employees are eligible for an annual performance bonus of up to 50% of base salary , assessed and dispersed every six months. The structure is intentionally non-linear — top performers earn disproportionately more, and we want it that way. This isn't stack-ranked: if everyone is exceptional, everyone earns at the top. Your individual contribution is the primary driver, with additional bonuses tied to both department and company outcomes. If you're a top performer, this is where we want that to pay off. Consistent high performance also influences base salary increases, with similar non-linear structures — so the compounding effect over time is significant, and can result in very quick salary and professional growth.

Base salary offers are given based on the experience level of the candidate but applicants should expect base salary levels in-line with their experience level for the Boston area. We are willing to hire multiple exceptional candidates with this posting.

Perks

• Top-tier health, dental and vision insurance (75% covered)

• 15 days vacation (20 once seniority is reached). Unlimited sick leave

• Commute reimbursement (75%)

• Wellness program ($50/month)

• Cell Phone Reimbursement ($50/month)

• 401K Matching (up to 5%)

• Equity + re-ups based on performance