Controls & Embedded Systems Engineer - Field Deployment

The power grid was built for a world that no longer exists. Centralized generation, hundred-mile transmission lines, decade-long permitting cycles. Meanwhile, demand is exploding: AI data centers, industrial electrification, remote operations that need megawatts yesterday and can't wait for utilities to catch up.

American Turbines is designing small modular gas turbines, purpose-built for distributed power generation. Machines designed from a blank sheet to be manufactured at scale, clustered in arrays. Hundreds of units operating in parallel, dynamically matching load like a compute cluster matches demand. We are a seed-stage company backed by the investors behind SpaceX, Boom Supersonic, and Hadrian.

The Controls Engineer for our installation program will own running the microturbines we bring on-site, first as a single unit and then as a fleet, on their existing controls. You are the person who gets these machines started, keeps them running, and relays every bit of turbine data back to HQ.

You'll be based in San Francisco, but plan on stretches of weeks on-site during installation and commissioning, not just the occasional trip. You will be on-site for our first installation, working directly with the equipment rather than managing it remotely. You'll troubleshoot control issues in the field, in real time, on hardware we're still getting to know. Down the line, this work may also inform how we approach controls on our own turbines.

This is not a desk job, but it's not permanent field presence either. You should want to be at a remote industrial site for weeks at a time when the work calls for it, hands-on with the equipment, not just willing to tolerate it.

Experience with real-time controls on complex, safety-critical electromechanical systems, whatever the domain. Turbines, generators, industrial robotics, autonomous vehicles, anything where you had to get a physical system running and keep it running. What matters more than the specific system is that you get productive fast on unfamiliar hardware, reading schematics and control logic you didn't write and finding your way around them under pressure.

You're the kind of engineer who wants to be at the site, not in the office reading the logs after the fact. You're comfortable being the person who has to figure out why something isn't working the way the manual says it should, on a system you didn't design.