Chemical Lab Technician (£40k-£50k + Equity) at Rivan Industries - Synthetic fuel startup

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.