Founding Electrical Engineer

Why This Role Exists

This is an opportunity to unify deep electrical engineering with chemical engineering and help revolutionize the way we produce the building blocks of our society: with the potential to affect billions of dollars of production, billions of tons of CO₂, and billions of people.

For over a century, the chemical industry has relied on a brutal, brute-force approach to manufacturing: using massive amounts of heat and pressure to force molecules to react. It is an energy-intensive process responsible for a massive footprint on our planet.  Rhoic is building a radically elegant alternative.

Chemistry is fundamentally just the rearrangement of electrons; we use precisely tuned electric fields to influence chemical reactions directly. Nature has used this exact blueprint for billions of years. Enzymes leverage local electric fields to drive highly selective chemistry flawlessly. Rhoic is the first to engineer this profound natural principle into a fully inorganic, scalable, industrial reactor platform.

Because the electric field drives the reactions, the electrical architecture isn't just a supporting component, it is core to our success. This role exists to build that system from first principles.

Where We Are

Rhoic was founded by builders with deep technical and commercial experience in advanced materials and cleantech. We are venture backed and supported by Activate at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and three separate DOE programs. We have additional support from mHUB, FedTech, and Cyclotron Road. Our advisory network includes world-class researchers in resonant power electronics and electrochemistry.We have a built out  lab space in Emeryville CA and instrument access at LBNL’s Molecular Foundry.

We have initial designs for and are building our prototype reactor using a closed-loop electrical/chemical signal during operation which produces chemicals more efficiently and selectively. You will own the electrical direction for the reactor. That means high-voltage power systems, field design, control electronics, and the physics of how the reactor works and scales.

We are pre-revenue. This is a ground-floor role that requires someone to be hands-on building. There is no team under you yet. You will work directly with our CEO (technical co-founder) and have real ownership over the electrical architecture from day one.

The Electrical Challenge

The reactor presents a highly capacitive, nonlinear load. The ceramic core’s engineered permittivity produces capacitances of 300–700 nF in the actual reactor geometry. The existing working drive unit operates around ±335V in the low-kHz range today, but the right voltage, frequency, and waveform depend on chemistry and the control scheme and hardware is an open question: the first job is to characterize the load and let that measurement set the operating point. High displacement currents and a load whose impedance shifts with temperature, voltage, and catalytic state make this an unusual high-voltage design problem.

The reaction produces an electronic fingerprint before any product analyzer can confirm it: catalytic activity shows up as a small change in the reactor’s impedance, dissipation, or phase. Detecting that signal cleanly (and trusting it) is as central to this role as driving the reactor in the first place. That fast electrical readout is the feedback-loop the whole program iterates on.

This is a first-of-its-kind system. There is no playbook. When something behaves unexpectedly, (and it will!) the job is to determine whether the problem lives in the electronics, the material, the geometry, or the measurement itself. That diagnostic instinct, the ability to think across domains and isolate root cause under uncertainty, is as important as any specific technical skill.

HV safety procedures, interlocks, and operating limits are treated as engineering requirements at Rhoic.

What You Will Accomplish

The near-term goal is singular: improve on the existing architecture to produce measurable performance data that supports scaling and the next round of fundraising. Everything early serves that, and anything that doesn’t can wait.

What the Job Requires

• Hands-on Hardware Experience: You have designed, laid out, and built real PCBs, taking electrical systems from concept to working, debugged hardware.
• First-Principles Troubleshooting: When a system fails or behaves unexpectedly, your instinct is to isolate variables, explore explanations, and hunt down the actual root cause. You enjoy the puzzle-solving aspect of debugging complex systems.
• Physics-Driven Intuition: We are doing something where physics drives design decisions. A strong foundational grasp of electromagnetism and electric fields matters just as much to us as pure circuit design skill.
• Adaptive Learning: You are comfortable working with early-stage ambiguity. You might not know every niche sub-discipline on day one, but you have a track record of reading the literature, asking the right questions, and rapidly teaching yourself what you need to know to solve a problem.
• Collaborative Engagement: You work fluidly across a tight-knit team, document what you find, and keep the people around you oriented. You are honest about what you can and cannot do, and direct when something is taking longer than expected. You know you are part of a bigger team.
• Rigorous Safety Culture: You treat high-voltage lab safety as an uncompromisable habit and stop immediately when a stop condition is met. You care about making sure others remain safe who know less than you do.
• Egoless Solutioning: You problem solve as an individual and as a teammate. You hold your design ideas loosely, approach technical disagreements with humility, and are ready to pivot when system-level realities demand a different approach.

Technical Areas You Have Mastered (or are Excited to Learn)

We don’t expect you to check every single box below on day one. We are looking for a strong foundational baseline in core electrical engineering, a passion for measurement, and a fierce willingness to master the rest on the job:

• Power Electronics & Hardware Design: Experience with power stage design (switching or linear), gate drives, power supplies, or managing thermal requirements for high-dissipation systems.
• Driving Complex Loads: Experience working with, or a strong theoretical grasp of how to handle, capacitive, inductive, or highly reactive loads.
• Precision Measurement & Signal Integrity: A sharp eye for pulling small, trustworthy signals out of noisy environments. You understand what makes data credible and are eager to dive into concepts like differential voltage measurement, current instrumentation, or LCR metrology and impedance spectroscopy.
• Digital Control Strategy: Comfort defining the real-time control architecture (whether choosing a microcontroller, DSP, or FPGA). Note: You don't need to be a full-time firmware wizard; contractor support is available to offload heavy coding so you can focus on the hardware.

We don't expect you to be a pre-packaged expert in both high-power electronics and precision scientific instrumentation. If you have deep roots in one side, a strong grasp of first-principles physics, and the appetite to rapidly learn the other side, you are exactly who we are looking for.

Note on Degrees: We care more about shipped and debugged hardware than degrees

Where This Can Go

From day one, you are shaping the electrical architecture of the entire platform, not executing an existing roadmap. We’re looking for someone insatiably curious and hungry to learn, tinker, and build; the ideal candidate is someone capable of holding cross-disciplinary (electrical, chemical, mechanical) aspects of a problem in their mind to see the big picture. To be candid, we want to find the right person to eventually bring on as a CTO, and potentially co-founder. We are not offering that title on day one because we want to work together first. If it is a fit, that conversation happens fast. Regardless, the specifics of this structure will be discussed openly in our first conversation.

What You Will Not Be Doing Alone

We are a collaborative team building together. Our materials scientist and mechanical engineer are co-participants in every reactor experiment.

How to Apply

Interested candidates should submit their resume by clicking the button below or by going to Rhoic Job Application.

Answer this Prompt in the Application: Describe a complex electrical or hardware system you designed, brought up, and debugged. Walk us through what went wrong, how you isolated the variables, and how you diagnosed the root cause, especially if it forced you to learn something completely outside your comfort zone.

Salary: $125,000-175,000 + 3-5% equity