Mechanical Engineer

Golden Gate Recruiting is thrilled to be hiring for American Turbines, a seed-stage hard tech company in San Francisco backed by the investors behind SpaceX, Boom Supersonic, and Hadrian!

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: 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 Mechanical Engineer will own everything that turns a running turbine core into a deployable product: the package, the structural frame, the mounts, and the mechanical systems that keep the machine fed, cooled, and serviceable in the field. You own the enclosure, the baseplate, the vibration isolation, and the lift and transport provisions. You will define how the core engine drops into a unit that installs in days, not months, and how hundreds of those units cluster, share infrastructure, and get serviced without a crane and a week of downtime. A turbine that runs on a test stand is a science project until someone makes it deployable, repeatable, and serviceable at scale. That will be your job.

What We're Looking For

Experience designing packaged machinery and mechanical systems: gensets, engines, turbines, compressors, skids, or comparable high-power equipment built to ship and run in the field. You design for manufacture and assembly from the first sketch.

You understand the tradeoffs between footprint, cost, serviceability, and time to install. You move fast from packaging concepts to released drawings without losing rigor. You have seen hardware ship, install, and run, and you know what looks clean on a screen and fails in the field. Familiarity with packaged power, gensets, turbochargers, or small gas turbines is strongly preferred, as is direct experience taking a machine from drawing to deployed unit.

Location and work authorization

• This role is fully on-site in San Francisco (Dogpatch). You must live in the SF Bay Area or be open to relocating to San Francisco.
• Visa sponsorship and visa transfers are not offered for this role. Applicants must be authorized to work in the US without sponsorship.