About American Turbines
The power grid was built for a world that no longer exists. Centralized generation, hundred-mile transmission lines, decade-long permitting cycles. Meanwhile, demand is exploding: AI data centers, industrial electrification, remote operations that need megawatts yesterday and can't wait for utilities to catch up.
American Turbines is designing small modular gas turbines, purpose-built for distributed power generation. Machines designed from a blank sheet to be manufactured at scale, clustered in arrays. Hundreds of units operating in parallel, dynamically matching load like a compute cluster matches demand. We are a seed-stage company backed by the investors behind SpaceX, Boom Supersonic, and Hadrian.
About the Role
The Turbomachinery Design & Systems Engineer will own the mechanical design of the engine, from clean-sheet component layout through the analysis that proves the machine will survive in the field. You will design the rotors, stators, combustor, cases, and bearings, select the materials, and own how every piece fits together as one coherent power generation system.
You will define the interfaces between the mechanical, thermal, fuel, and control subsystems and make the calls that keep the whole machine integrated. You will run the structural, thermal, and rotordynamic analysis that decides when a part is ready to cut metal. And you will work directly with our suppliers and machinists to make sure what you draw can actually be built, repeatably, to drawing and spec.
This is a high-ownership role on a small team. The work you do will determine how durable, how manufacturable, and how fast we reach market.
What We're Looking For
Experience in clean-sheet mechanical design of rotating machinery: gas turbines, turbochargers, turboshaft engines, turbopumps, or similar. Strong command of structural and thermal FEA and the judgment to know which loads actually matter. Hands-on material selection for hot, high-speed, high-cycle environments. You can move fast from conceptual sizing to detailed design without losing rigor, and you design for manufacturability from the first sketch.
Strongly preferred: rotordynamics, LCF and HCF fatigue, creep life, and bearing load analysis. Direct experience with small gas turbines. A track record of taking hardware from clean sheet to running test article. Fluency working with machine shops and suppliers, and the ability to look at a part and know whether it can be made.
Skills Required
- Experience with clean-sheet mechanical design of rotating machinery such as gas turbines, turbochargers, turboshaft engines, turbopumps, or similar
- Strong command of structural and thermal finite element analysis
- Ability to identify and evaluate critical operating loads
- Hands-on material selection for hot, high-speed, high-cycle environments
- Ability to move from conceptual sizing to detailed design while maintaining engineering rigor
- Design-for-manufacturability experience
- Experience working directly with machine shops and suppliers
- Rotordynamics experience
- Low-cycle fatigue and high-cycle fatigue analysis experience
- Creep-life analysis experience
- Bearing-load analysis experience
- Direct experience with small gas turbines
- Track record of taking hardware from clean sheet to running test article
What We Do
American Turbines develops mass-manufacturable compact gas turbines for rapid, distributed power generation. Its modular systems are designed to ship and install quickly, operate in parallel, and scale into clustered arrays as demand grows. The company is addressing rising electricity needs from data centers, industrial electrification, and remote operations with small turbines built for deployment without lengthy utility buildouts or permitting cycles.
