R&D Prototype & Test Technician

Full-time · On-site · Woodinville, WA

About Standard Thermal

Standard Thermal is developing and deploying the world’s lowest-cost thermal energy storage technology, using earth as a thermal battery. We deliver a year-round steady supply of thermal energy to industrial consumers by buffering solar PV energy through a large thermal battery. To do this, we are building and field-testing thermal systems that combine mechanical hardware, heat transfer, electrical power, instrumentation, controls, and standard heavy construction methods.

You will be a load-bearing member of a small, fast-moving team, with substantial influence over how Standard Thermal advances technology and commercial deployment in parallel. This role operates at the intersection of customers, commercial strategy, and engineering. You will help focus the company on the highest-leverage markets, customers, deployment pathways, and partnerships.

This is not a conventional business development role. We are looking for someone who can combine commercial judgement, technical curiosity, and strategic thinking to help turn a broadly applicable technology into a large-scale business.

What you will do

• Develop commercialization strategy: Identify and prioritize markets, geographies, customer segments, sequencing, and scale-up strategy that create the strongest path to large-scale adoption.
• Build customer pipeline: Identify, develop, and advance relationships with industrial customers and strategic partners.
• Develop and refine commercial models: Evaluate alternative business models, ownership models, financing pathways, and partnership structures for different customer segments and stages of deployment.
• Advance projects: Work with customers, vendors, and internal team to move projects from initial engagement to aligned commercial terms and to deployment planning.
• Build the ecosystem: Develop relationships with relevant industrial partners, project developers, EPCs, equipment suppliers, energy companies, utilities, financiers, and other organizations that can accelerate deployment.
• Represent the voice of the customer: Develop a deep understanding of customer use cases, economics, site constraints, and procurement processes to define requirements and priorities that inform product decisions.
• Partner deeply with engineering: Work directly with the technical team to understand system capabilities and tradeoffs, communicate market requirements, and ensure that engineering decisions are informed by customer use cases.
• Understand the economics: Leverage techno-economic models to understand project economics and cost sensitivities from first principles, and accurately communicate the relevant economics to customers and partners.

What we are looking for

• Demonstrated ability to develop and execute commercialization strategy for complex technology, energy, infrastructure, or other hardware businesses.
• Technical fluency. Able to develop a working understanding of engineering tradeoffs, energy flows, project economics, and technical constraints to engage credibly with customers, partners, and investors.
• Strong commercial judgement. Able to distinguish genuine scalable opportunities from distractions.
• Strategic/tactical balance. Equally comfortable developing a multi-year, multi-region commercialization strategy and advancing an immediate customer project.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills; able to communicate effectively with customers, partners, investors, and technical teams.
• Low ego, high ownership. Comfortable rapidly changing paths when evidence indicates, and asking for help or input when needed.
• Willingness to travel as needed to customer, partner, and project sites domestically and internationally.

Experience in industrial energy, thermal systems, industrial construction, project development, or related sectors is valuable but not required. We care more about a demonstrated track record of solving difficult commercial problems than about a particular career path.

Details: Competitive salary, equity, and benefits.

Interested? Send a resume and a short note about yourself to hiring@standardthermal.com. We are particularly interested to hear about past projects and significant accomplishments, including things you’ve done outside of work.

Full-time · On-site · Woodinville, WA

About Standard Thermal

Standard Thermal is developing and deploying the world’s lowest-cost thermal energy storage technology, using earth as a thermal battery. We deliver a year-round steady supply of thermal energy to industrial consumers by buffering solar PV energy through a large thermal battery. To do this, we are building and field-testing thermal systems that combine mechanical hardware, heat transfer, electrical power, instrumentation, controls, and standard heavy construction methods.

You will be a load-bearing member of a small, fast-moving team, with significant responsibility for the systems that we deploy. Systems you develop will ultimately be deployed at enormous scale, presenting a unique opportunity for individual contributions to have outsized impact.

What you will do

• Own problems end-to-end: Solve problems from first-principles reasoning through design, build, test, iteration, and scale-up.
• Design and build hardware: Ideate and build mechanical and electro-mechanical systems supporting ongoing development and field deployments.
• Cross disciplinary boundaries: Design and build systems that include mechanical assemblies, sensors, controllers, heaters, and other electrical/mechanical components.
• Simplify aggressively: Our cost requirements necessitate ruthless adherence to simplification.
• Scale what works: Help translate benchtop and numerical modeling results into fieldable and scalable systems, with attention to manufacturability, cost, schedule, reliability, and serviceability.
• Support field deployments: Travel as needed for building and commissioning test systems, and customer/vendor site visits.

What we are looking for

• BS/MS in mechanical or electrical engineering or related field, or equivalent practical experience. Capability is more important than credentials.
• Clear evidence that you enjoy building things. Past work projects, personal side projects, automotive work, Formula SAE, robotics, rocketry, or other similar hands-on experience all count.
• Demonstrated evidence of end-to-end problem solving.
• Broad foundation in physical sciences. Strong working knowledge of the governing principles of heat transfer, fluid mechanics, mechanics of materials, electrical circuits, and related fields.
• Fluency with engineering calculations. Comfortable rapidly bounding unfamiliar problems using hand calculations, order-of-magnitude estimates, and simple spreadsheet models before moving to detailed design or simulation.
• Quantitative sanity checking. Develop an independent expectation for what an answer should look like from first-principles reasoning, and recognize when a measurement, simulation, or vendor proposal is physically implausible.
• Comfort moving between mechanical design/CAD, electrical component selection, sensors/instrumentation, data acquisition, troubleshooting, and experimental work, with a preference for experience in industrial process environments.
• Bias towards practical utility and rapid learning. You care about whether the system works and is cost-effective in practice.
• Low ego, high ownership. Comfortable rapidly changing paths when evidence and test results indicate, and asking for help or input when needed.
• Eagerness to work hands-on in both lab and outdoor field environments and get dirty when the job requires.

Details: Competitive salary, equity, and benefits.

Interested? Send a resume and a short note about yourself to hiring@standardthermal.com. We are particularly interested to hear about past projects and significant accomplishments, including things you’ve done outside of work.

Full-time · On-site · Woodinville, WA

About Standard Thermal

Standard Thermal is developing and deploying the world’s lowest-cost thermal energy storage technology, using dirt as a thermal battery. We deliver a year-round steady supply of thermal energy to industrial consumers by buffering solar PV energy through a large thermal battery. To do this, we are building and field-testing thermal systems that combine mechanical hardware, heat transfer, electrical power, instrumentation, controls, and standard heavy construction methods.

You will be a load-bearing member of a small, fast-moving team, with significant responsibility for the systems that we deploy. Systems you develop will ultimately be deployed at enormous scale, presenting a unique opportunity for individual contributions to have outsized impact.

What you will do

• Own deep technical problems: Investigate difficult or poorly characterized physical phenomena that materially affect system performance. Develop the governing physical understanding, analytical and/or numerical models, and experiments needed to turn uncertainty into engineering decisions.
• Model system-level behavior: Develop and extend analytical methods and numerical models to evaluate system architecture, operating strategies, and long-duration transient behavior.
• Model and validate coupled physics: Develop, extend, and validate COMSOL or other numerical models for coupled thermal-fluid systems. Compare predictions against laboratory and field data and translate results into design decisions.
• Accelerate the engineering team: Partner closely with design and test engineers to resolve difficult technical questions through analysis and modeling, translating complex physics into faster engineering progress.
• Design and run experiments: Design, build, run, and interpret data from experiments to validate critical numerical or analytical results.
• Support customer designs and field deployments: Develop numerical and analytical models for customer designs, using location-specific solar profiles along with customer-specific energy usage profiles to model multi-year transient thermal performance.

What we are looking for

• M.S. or PhD in mechanical engineering, applied physics, chemical engineering, or another relevant physical sciences field, or equivalent background and experience.
• Exceptional command of thermal and fluid dynamics, including heat transfer, fluid flow, and coupled heat/mass transport.
• Strong numerical modeling capability: Experience with COMSOL or similar finite element method simulations, with preferred experience in transient thermodynamics calculations and CFD models.
• Experience applying numerical and analytical methods to practical, fast-paced product development and deployment decisions. Experience with deployment in large industrial environments is a plus.
• Strong mechanical intuition and background, and evidence that you enjoy connecting analysis to physical hardware.
• Low ego, high ownership. Comfortable rapidly changing paths when evidence and test results indicate.
• Comfortable working hands-on in both lab and outdoor field environments, and getting dirty when the job requires.

Details: Competitive salary, equity, and benefits.

Interested? Send a resume and a short note about yourself to hiring@standardthermal.com. We are particularly interested to hear about past projects and significant accomplishments, including things you’ve done outside of work.