Senior Development Engineer

Senior Development Engineer

Climeworks

Opfikon, Zurich, Switzerland

Your mission

Job description

• Collector Concepts Development: As part of the Concepts & Innovation team, you invent, design, and develop new CO₂ collector system architectures that integrate sorbent and process requirements into practical, manufacturable equipment.
• Prototyping: You prototype and test your concepts and sub-systems, taking a hands-on approach from early proof of concept to final acceptance testing. You design and execute experiments to validate concepts, troubleshoot issues, and optimize designs.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: You work closely with our in-house sorbent and process experts, as well as system engineers, to align material and process properties with mechanical implementation. By developing a deep understanding of sorbent and process performance, you invent new ways of implementing them into collectors. You contribute to the scale-up from lab to pilot to industrial scale, balancing performance, reliability, and CAPEX. In addition, you collaborate with the Industrialization team on detailed engineering, manufacturing, compliance, and scaling, creating a strong feedback loop that ensures innovative concepts evolve into robust, market-ready equipment.
• Stakeholder & Project Management: You keep stakeholders aligned by documenting designs, insights, and lessons learned, ensuring transparency and continuity throughout the project lifecycle.
• Intellectual Property: You keep a close eye on the industry's state of the art and actively contribute to generating new intellectual property.

Your story

Requirements

• Education & Engineering Expertise: You hold a degree in Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Process Engineering, or related field; an advanced degree is preferred. You have at least 5 years of experience in equipment development, ideally with systems involving steam, vacuum, and thermal management. You have strong expertise in industrial equipment design, prototyping, and testing.
• Approach to Innovation: You have hands-on experience in building and validating lab-scale or pilot-scale hardware. Proven track record of innovation and rapid prototyping, with the ability to creatively solve engineering challenges under uncertainty.
• Technical Knowledge: You possess In-depth knowledge of detail design, design-for-manufacture, industrialization, and scaling hardware concepts from lab to industrial applications. Proficiency in CAD software (preferably SolidWorks) for designing parts and systems. Familiarity with process industry, sorbents, adsorption/desorption processes, or thermal separation technologies is considered a plus.
• Mindset & Working Style: You are comfortable working in multidisciplinary teams, bridging material science, process engineering, mechanical design, and industrialization. You possess strong communication skills with an entrepreneurial mindset and a fail-fast, learn-fast approach.
• Language: You are proficient in English, both spoken and written.