About the role
Parallax is hiring a senior mechanical engineer to help design a gas turbine for AI data center power generation — essentially an aircraft engine optimized for speed and scale rather than extreme efficiency.
The product is a ~3,000-part mechanical assembly; senior engineers will own complex sub-systems and partner directly with the founder on architecture decisions.
What we're looking for:
- Built hardware at scale AND from zero to one. Both signals matter; if forced to pick one, zero-to-one is the higher priority.
- Process-fluent over product-fluent: we hire people who understand how to ship hardware, not people anchored to a specific product they shipped.
- Strong candidates often come from SpaceX or comparable hardware-at-scale environments.
- Comfortable owning ~100 parts of a 3,000-part assembly end-to-end.
This is a small team (currently 4) with a hard deadline: full-scale prototype out the door by end of 2027. Quarter-billion fundraise underway. Carl Schoeller (founder) is a YC S24 alum and previously founded Theseus, a defense-tech company.
In-person San Francisco (Dogpatch). No remote.
About Parallax
Parallax is a hardware startup founded by Carl Schoeller, a second-time founder whose previous company Theseus (defense-tech) went through YC S24. The company is building full-scale gas turbines to meet the massive power demand from hyperscalers, targeting a ~$1T addressable market as data center operators have publicly requested ~1 TW of new power by end of decade. Parallax raised $8M in pre-seed funding in 2024 and is scaling aggressively — hiring 30 mechanical and turbomachinery engineers with a goal of completing a full-scale gas turbine prototype by end of 2027. Early hires include 2 ex-SpaceX engineers and 1 ex-Pratt & Whitney engineer with 5 years there who previously founded his own turbine company.