About the role

We are looking for a Senior Electrical Design Engineer with 5-15 years of experience to take ownership of our industrial AC power architecture as we scale from 1 megawatt to multi-megawatt synthetic fuel plants. You'll be joining a lean, high-ownership engineering team at one of Europe's most well-funded hardware startups, designing electrical systems that power modular direct air capture, electrolyzer, and reactor subsystems. We need someone who combines deep technical experience in power systems and functional safety with the creativity to challenge conventional engineering approaches because we're designing for lowest cost of methane production, not highest efficiency. This is a foundational hire to bring in-house expertise that prevents costly redesigns as we scale toward 50MW unit production.

What will you be doing?

Own the full AC power system architecture — optimizing power conversion, distribution, and balance of plant for cost, manufacturability, and reliability at megawatt scale
Produce and maintain power architecture schematics, protection strategies, cable sizing calculations, and panel designs that meet regulatory requirements
Lead or contribute to safety system architecture including HAZOPs, HAZIDs, FMEAs, and functional safety standards (IEC 61508) — ensuring designs are safe for environments with hydrogen present
Design electrical systems (3-phase, motors, pumps, heaters, I/Os) across the reactor, electrolyzer, and direct air capture subsystems, accounting for variable solar-powered production profiles
Lead panel certification activities under the Machinery Directive and Low Voltage Directive (CE/UKCA) and mentor junior engineers

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.

Senior Electrical Design Engineer

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