Mechanical Engineer

About the job

Rivan Industries (Rivan.com) is a synthetic fuel company designed to decarbonise heavy industry. We’ve developed a unique power-to-fuel machine built for low-capex deployment powered entirely by utility-scale solar. We already have operating modules of our machine, we’re funded, and we’re now building out the team to bring the vision together and deploy at scale. Here's our step by step business model and plan: https://rivan.com/the-case-for-synthetic-fuels/


We aim to make synthetic fuel cheaper than fossil fuels and sustain life on earth by keeping the CO2 locked underground. We’re looking for a mechanical engineer to help us speed up development of our 3 core product modules – Alkaline electrolyser, Direct-air-capture, and Sabatier reactor. If you want to work on a high-impact technology that you’ll see the impact of in the world surrounded by smart people working with a sense of urgency and intensity – this is for you. For how that looks, here's how we run the company: https://rivan.com/how-we-operate/

The role:
· Accelerate the testing of each of our 3 product modules
· This will include both designing processes and building first versions of them in-house
· Simplify and increase efficiency of each design
· Review thermal balances and fluid calculations to simplify as part of a connected system
· Review material considerations
· Design balance-of-plant operations in a closed-loop system
· Building a system that can operate for 24 hours/day with only 5 hours of intermittent DC solar input

Core skills:
• 3+ years professional experience
• Bachelor’s or Masters in mechanical engineering or related field
• Chemical reactor, direct-air-capture or electrolyser design and build experience (or related)

The things that are important to us for this role:
• Execution history. What have you built or designed before where you had the responsibility? HYSYS is easy, have you done this in the real world?
• Reasoning by first principles. Can you deconvolute complex scenarios into their foundational truths or parts?
• Urgency. We don’t have time to wait, are you comfortable with a high-degree of risk and pressure to move fast?
• Grit. How relentless will you be despite set-backs? We’re going up against some big opposition.

The things we don’t care about very much:
• Where you went to school / education
• Where you have worked previously

Specifics:
• £60-70K Salary depending on experience
• Significant share options as part of the early team
• In-person work at our HQ in Bermondsey, South-East London
• Flexible time-off

To apply, email why you’re great for this role to harvey@rivan.com. The only thing we’re looking for is execution proof – so any projects you’ve built from the ground up or were responsible for are way more important to us than a CV.

Or, better yet, send your best design on how you’d think about building an ultra-cheap, ultra-simple LNG liquefaction module that can handle of 500L/min of CH4. Mostly looking for all the design considerations based on our constraints around intermittent solar, simplicity, cost, and scale requirements. The simpler, the better!