We are looking for a Senior Mechanical Engineer with 6+ years of experience to design, build, and scale novel rare earth reactors and production lines from concept through commissioning. You'll join a lean, high-output team of engineers and scientists from MIT, Tesla, and SpaceX who are building an entirely new category of American metalmaking. Everything is fabricated in-house — vacuum induction furnaces, high-temperature reactors, tilt casting systems, and automated production lines — meaning you'll own real, end-to-end projects that directly enable the company's rapid scale-up. Solcoa has $75M in seed funding, 10 tons of annual production today, and is racing to commission a 500-ton plant by mid-2027. If you want to work on bold mechanical engineering challenges with immediate, tangible impact, this is it.
What will you be doing?
Designing and building novel reactor subsystems, vacuum induction furnaces, and high-temperature production equipment entirely in-house
Owning mechanical design projects end-to-end — from CAD modeling through fabrication, prototyping, and commissioning on active production lines
Engineering complex systems such as tilt casting mechanisms for molten metal handling, high-vacuum systems, and automated material handling
Specifying components, tolerances, and materials of construction for extreme environments (high-temp, corrosive, vacuum)
Collaborating with the in-house fabrication shop and operations team to rapidly iterate and scale new production capacity
Solcoa Industries is building the next generation of American metalmaking, starting with rare earths — the metals that power all electrified motion. Every EV, fighter jet, wind turbine, MRI machine, and data center relies on rare earths, yet virtually all production of these critical metals has been shipped to China, where they're produced using incredibly destructive legacy processes that are illegal in the rest of the world.
Mission: To reshore critical metal production to the West with new, better, cleaner technologies — enabling the world to control its electrified future without relying on destructive legacy processes.
Culture: Solcoa is a lean, output-driven team where every person is essential. The environment is fast-paced, ambitious, and deeply technical, with everything from reactors to furnaces built in-house using their own fabrication shop. No one does busy work.
Salary
$175,000 - $250,000
Location
Alameda, United States
Experience
6+ years
Total raised
$200K
Last stage
Pre-seed
Investors
No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.