Head of Engineering

The hardest industrial brines are untreatable at economic cost today. Produced water in the Permian. Mining process water. Flue gas desulfurization. Cooling tower blowdown from data centers. These streams are the binding constraint on industrial growth, and conventional treatment — thermal evaporation, reverse osmosis, crystallizers — break down at exactly the salinities that matter most.

COMPANY DESCRIPTION

Cetos Water is commercializing the first system designed to cost effectively handle them. Temperature Swing Solvent Extraction (TSSE) is a membrane‑less, non‑evaporative process that treats hypersaline brines at low temperature, recovering freshwater and critical minerals at a fraction of the energy cost of conventional systems. The technology originated at Columbia University and has been advanced in‑house.

A fully continuous, multi‑stage pilot is running today and hitting its targets. The company has been independently validated and funded by a series of mission‑aligned institutions:

• Winner, Wheaton Precious Metals Future of Mining Challenge ($1M non‑dilutive, March 2026)

We are a small, technically dense team building for deployment into real industrial environments, not for the lab, not for the pitch deck.

THE ROLE

This is the senior‑most engineering role at Cetos. You will own how our technology becomes deployable industrial infrastructure — designing, building, and iterating systems that run in the field, under load, on real customer brine.

You'll start as a player‑coach: hands on design, vendor engagement, and early builds, while leading the engineering function and working directly alongside our science team on the underlying chemistry. You will report to the CEO.

WHAT YOU'LL OWN

• End‑to‑end design of TSSE systems from pilot through first commercial scale, including materials selection for hypersaline service, solvent recovery loops, thermal integration, and management of precipitation and scaling
• Make first‑principles tradeoffs between performance, cost, footprint, and reliability under real‑world operating envelopes
• Own the process architecture, P&IDs, equipment specification, and integration strategy for each deployment

Scale-up: pilot to field to commercial

• Drive the transition from small pilots to field‑deployable skid‑mounted systems
• Define what is off‑the‑shelf vs. novel — and how each will be validated, sourced, and integrated
• Take a novel unit operation through an FEL‑2 / FEL‑3 stage‑gate equivalent in an industrial context
• Own the techno‑economic model. At Cetos the TEA is an engineering deliverable, it decides which unit operations earn their capex, which R&D results matter, and which customers we pursue.
• Translate real customer brine chemistries — produced water, lithium brine reject, FGD, tailings — into system specs, pilot plans, and a defensible business case: capex, opex, payback, $/m³
• Integrate TSSE into existing plant infrastructure alongside customer process engineers and build technical credibility with engineering leadership at mining majors, upstream oil & gas operators, IPPs, and semiconductor fabs

Engineering with AI in the loop

• Run the engineering function AI‑natively, and set that tone by demonstrating it. You are the early adopter, the standard you set cascades into every engineer you hire and how you size the team
• Build the leverage in deliberately: a controls library that generates the bulk of the code from prompts rather than a team of controls engineers writing it by hand; simulation and TEA sensitivity runs that would otherwise be a week of manual work; pilot data that tells you which experiment to run next instead of waiting for someone to read the plots.
• Make the software and data decisions while the design is still open — instrumentation density, where control lives, what sits above SCADA. Those decisions cannot be bought back later.

Build the engineering function

• Lead and grow the team; own the engineering roadmap and the hiring plan behind it
• Stand up the discipline that carries us from first commercial system to fleet — design reviews, risk registers, commissioning protocols, stage‑gates — knowing what rigor to add and what to skip
• Run a sharp make‑versus‑buy strategy: what to vertically integrate, what to hand to EPCs, fabricators, and controls vendors, and the relationships to execute against it

WHO YOU ARE

We're looking for someone with deep technical experience and first‑principles fluency, the creative resourcefulness to solve novel problems under real constraints, and the communication skills to represent Cetos externally at the highest levels. Exceptional candidates may come from adjacent domains.

• You have taken a first‑of‑a‑kind process or hardware system from pilot to field deployment. Not just designed it on paper, but debugged it at 2am in a remote site when it was failing and the customer was watching
• You have been early at a hard tech company where you helped translate a novel process into a real system under capital and time constraints
• You have specified and procured skid‑mounted process equipment for industrial deployment
• You have built the business case, not just the system, payback, unit economics, $/m³, and used it to triage opportunities rather than punting the question to a commercial team.
• You have already built AI into how you engineer. Named tools, in your own workflow, on real work — code and controls generation, simulation and modelling, data analysis, documentation.
• You have a background in chemical engineering, separations, hydrometallurgy, or industrial water, with strong first‑principles fluency in mass transfer, thermodynamics, and process design
• You have integrated novel unit operations into existing industrial plants (mining, oil & gas, power, semiconductor, or similar)
• You make sound decisions with incomplete data, find creative paths through hard problems, and know the difference between a risk worth taking and one worth retiring
• You communicate clearly and credibly with senior stakeholders — customers, investors, DOE, and academic partners — and can translate deep technical work into language that lands
• You care about what Cetos is building. Water is a real constraint on industrial growth, and you want to work on problems that matter
• You want to build a company, not just a product, and you understand what it means to carry the technical credibility of an organization as it earns its first commercial customers

WHY THIS ROLE

Most deep‑tech engineering roles give you one of three things: the novel technology, the commercial deployment, or the equity to matter. This role gives you all three.

Water is the binding constraint on industrial growth this decade — on mining expansion, on data center siting, on semiconductor buildout, or the energy transition itself. The infrastructure layer that unlocks it has not yet been built.

You will not just optimize a system. You will define how an entirely new class of industrial infrastructure gets designed, deployed, and scaled.