About the role
We are looking for a Principal Process Engineer with 10+ years of experience to own process engineering across Rivan's modular synthetic fuel system — from novel architecture design through to deployment and commissioning. You'll bring deep experience designing, building, and operating process plants, combined with the creativity and pace to apply that knowledge to first-of-a-kind technology at rapid scale. Rivan has deployed the UK's largest synthetic fuel plant and is planning to 1000x this scale, so we need someone who can prevent costly rework by getting the process design right from the start. This is a rare opportunity to join a generational company at a foundational moment, with complete ownership of process safety and system design across reactor, electrolyser, and DAC modules.
What will you be doing?
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Owning process engineering across the full Rivan system — reactor, electrolyser, and direct air capture — from concept through deployment
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Leading process safety including HAZOPs, hazard assessments, and FMEAs to ensure designs are safe and compliant at multi-megawatt scale
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Ideating novel process architectures optimised for lowest cost of methane production rather than highest efficiency — a fundamentally different design philosophy
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Overseeing construction and commissioning of large-scale synthetic fuel sites, bringing experience from prior large project deployments
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Embedding institutional knowledge to prevent design rework as Rivan scales from 1MW proof-of-scale to 50MW+ mass manufacturing
About Rivan
Rivan Industries designs, manufactures, and deploys modular synthetic fuel plants. Their mission is to make life sustainable on earth by making it cheaper to pull fuels from the air than drill from the ground.
Rivan's technology captures CO2 directly from the atmosphere using a Direct Air Capture (DAC) system, splits water via an alkaline electrolyser to produce hydrogen, and synthesizes these together in a Sabatier reactor to produce synthetic natural gas — injected directly into the European gas grid. All of this is powered by off-grid solar that Rivan develops and deploys themselves, giving them access to the cheapest energy source in the world.
This isn't a carbon credit play — it's a pure economics company. Rivan is building foundational technology for an entirely new industry, aiming to produce synthetic fuels cheaper than fossil alternatives. They've deployed the UK's largest synthetic fuel plant and are planning to 1000x this scale in the next two years, with planning permission for what will be Europe's largest synthetic fuel plant.
Culture: Rivan is a fast-paced, engineering-first company where speed, ownership, and creativity are paramount. They run extremely lean on non-engineering functions (~90% of the team is engineering), and everyone — even the most senior people — remains hands-on as individual contributors. People have joined at mid-level and been promoted twice within months simply because they demonstrated the capacity to own entire subsystems. There's complete creative freedom, a flat structure under a solo founder, and the expectation that early team members will own entire departments and shape the future of the company.
Required skills
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Job details
Salary
£100,000 - £120,000
Location
London, United Kingdom
Experience
10+ years
Funding
Total raised
$46M
Last stage
Series A
Investors
Founders
What happens next.
No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.
Confirm the fit
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I pitch you to the company
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
A meeting lands on your calendar
If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.