At Aircapture, we’re creating and scaling a circular carbon economy to solve what we believe to be the challenge of our lifetime: the climate crisis. We supply commercial and industrial customers with clean CO₂ captured directly from the atmosphere, transforming a climate threat into a valuable resource. Solving a challenge of this scale takes people with different backgrounds, experiences, and ways of thinking. We value those differences and believe they make us a stronger team.
Aircapture is building the next generation of Direct Air Capture machines by iterating through the design-build-test loop to evolve from prototypes to production. You will test at every level, from component-level ALT to full system-level performance and optimization. You have done substantive test work on real systems, take pride in rigorous and reproducible results, and communicate your findings clearly to engineering peers and cross-functional collaborators. If you are a hands-on engineer who wants to do meaningful work at a groundbreaking climate technology company, we want to hear from you.
This role is onsite at our development and production facility in Berkeley, California.
Salary: $130,000-170,000 per year
What You’ll Do Here
- Conduct system-level testing of our DAC systems, including design envelope testing, performance characterization, and operational optimization
- Help define the metrics that describe system efficiency and performance, bridging the gap between high-level OKRs and design-team deliverables with a physics-based understanding of what our equipment actually does in operation
- Plan and conduct HALT and ALT testing programs in partnership with the design teams to de-risk new design concepts, including developing test objectives, designing fixtures, instrumenting the test rig, executing tests, performing analysis, and delivering clear feedback that informs the design process
- Develop a rigorous, data-driven understanding of equipment and part performance and reliability by characterizing performance degradation over time, validating or challenging design-life assumptions, and using these insights to inform predictive maintenance models and O&M schedules
- Translate test findings into actionable feedback for the design and operations teams, accelerating the feedback loops that drive the development process
- Partner across the organization to develop the data pipeline that moves test and operational data from the telemetry system into dashboards and reports that support engineering decisions
Your Skills and Abilities Include
- Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Controls Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Physics, or a closely related field. Master’s degree a plus
- 4–8 years of professional experience in test engineering, systems testing, or experimental R&D, with hands-on involvement in test programs on hardware systems, including test execution, instrumentation, and analysis
- Strong instrumentation and data acquisition background, including sensor selection, signal conditioning, DAQ and SCADA systems, and historian platforms, e.g., Ignition, ibaPDA, National Instruments, Keysight, or similar (we use Ignition)
- Hands-on experience with the full test cycle: test objective development, fixture design and build, instrumentation selection and installation, data logging, analysis, and design feedback
- Deep physics-based understanding of thermal, fluid, or electrochemical systems, sufficient to define meaningful performance metrics, identify anomalies in data, and evaluate whether a system is behaving as designed
- Aptitude with Python, JMP, SQL, Excel, or equivalent for data analysis and visualization; able to work alongside data engineers to shape the pipeline and extract meaning from large operational datasets
- Experience establishing quality or reliability systems in a hardware organization, including FAT requirements, reliability test programs, failure mode analysis, and health monitoring of deployed systems
- Proficiency developing performance metrics for complex systems—not just measuring what’s easy, but defining what matters and building the analysis to capture it
- A plus: leadership experience on small teams; project management experience; prior experience with Direct Air Capture, carbon capture, industrial process equipment, or other complex energy or climate hardware; experience scaling a test or quality function from early-stage through commercial production; background in reliability engineering, predictive maintenance, or asset performance management
This position requires physical activities including climbing stairs or ladders, stooping, crouching to work on equipment, operating machinery and lifting and carrying loads of 25 lbs or more.
Aircapture strives to create a safe, inclusive, equitable and diverse workplace where everyone can do their best work. We hope you feel welcome here.
Skills Required
- Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Controls Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Physics, or a closely related field
- 4-8 years of professional experience in test engineering, systems testing, or experimental research and development
- Hands-on experience conducting hardware-system test programs, including test execution, instrumentation, and analysis
- Strong instrumentation and data acquisition experience, including sensor selection, signal conditioning, DAQ, SCADA systems, and historian platforms
- Experience with the full test cycle, including test objectives, fixture design and build, instrumentation installation, data logging, analysis, and design feedback
- Physics-based understanding of thermal, fluid, or electrochemical systems
- Ability to use Python, JMP, SQL, Excel, or equivalent tools for data analysis and visualization
- Experience establishing quality or reliability systems in a hardware organization, including FAT requirements, reliability testing, failure mode analysis, and health monitoring
- Experience developing performance metrics for complex systems
- Ability to perform physical activities including climbing stairs or ladders, stooping, crouching, operating machinery, and lifting or carrying loads of 25 pounds or more
- Master's degree
- Leadership experience on small teams
- Project management experience
- Experience with Direct Air Capture, carbon capture, industrial process equipment, or complex energy or climate hardware
- Experience scaling a test or quality function from early-stage development through commercial production
- Background in reliability engineering, predictive maintenance, or asset performance management
What We Do
Aircapture’s modular, on-site technology captures climate-changing CO2 from the air, and puts it directly into our customers' production processes. The result is a greener, cleaner and cheaper product that can help their businesses go carbon neutral, or even negative. Previously, commercially available CO2 was produced and distributed only in ways that generate large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions, result in product impurities and include the often-substantial friction costs from transportation. For every tonne of delivered CO2, we estimate two or more tonnes of CO2 are emitted into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming and creating significant supply chain emissions, the cost of which are likely to materially increase. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions alone is not enough to avoid catastrophic climate change. Atmospheric carbon dioxide removal addresses legacy emissions and drives the development of critical, sustainable carbon-negative infrastructure. By utilizing atmospheric CO2, we can actually turn back the hands of time – reversing much of the damage that has already been done – while enabling our customers to economically build new carbon-to-value industries and alleviate energy poverty on a global scale. Our mission is to use Direct Air Capture (DAC) to help achieve these goals. DAC can be sited practically anywhere. There are no natural or technical limits to its scale, the quantity of carbon dioxide it removes is verifiable and it is cost-effective today
