Head of Plant Engineering

HYGENCO - The Hydrogen Company; Pune District; On-site; INR 4,000,000 - 7,000,000; Full time

Job summary

HYGENCO - The Hydrogen Company seeks a Head of Plant Engineering who will hold Design Authority for every plant built, guiding engineering from concept through commissioning and ensuring safety and longevity of plant assets.

You will lead a six-discipline engineering team, shape technical standards, and establish a robust partner network while turning designs into actionable drawings and safety cases for long-term operation.

Qualifications

• Fifteen to twenty years in process, chemical, or mechanical engineering.
• Independent design-authority or owner’s-engineer experience.
• Genuine comfort with process safety (HAZOP, LOPA, SIL).

Responsibilities

• Hold Design Authority for every plant we build and ensure engineering correctness and safety across the plant lifecycle.
• Lead a multidisciplinary engineering team spanning six disciplines and chair the design effort from concept to commissioning.
• Establish and maintain technical standards and an equipment catalogue to guide future projects.
• Evaluate and qualify external engineering partners to form a trusted design network.
• Develop the engineering platform that converts validated designs into working drawings and documentation and sign off on safety cases.

Job description

India is building a green hydrogen industry that, in most respects, does not have a rulebook yet. Someone has to write it while the plants are already being built. That is this job.

Hygenco is a pure-play green hydrogen company, building, owning, and operating some of India’s first commercial-scale green hydrogen plants. We recently closed a $105 million Series B round from IFC (part of the World Bank Group), Siemens, and Fullerton, alongside continued backing from existing investor Neev II Fund — capital committed to a multi-year build-out of commercial-scale plants, with an ambition to take the company public within the decade. You’ll own the engineering judgement behind every plant along that path — working alongside the team that develops our core process technology and the team that builds our plants physically, but accountable for something distinct from both: making sure each specific plant is engineered correctly, safely, and built to last.

The role

As Head of Plant Engineering, you hold Design Authority for every plant we build — the final call that a plant’s engineering is correct and safe, for its entire life, not just through construction. You’ll lead a multidisciplinary team across six engineering disciplines, chair the design effort on every project from concept to commissioning, and — because we’re still young — help build the technical standards your own engineering will run on for years to come.

What you’ll own

• Design Authority across every plant we build — holding for the plant’s entire life, not just through construction.
• A multidisciplinary engineering team spanning process, piping and civil, mechanical, controls and instrumentation, electrical, and process safety — one integrated design effort per project, that you personally lead from concept to final sign-off.
• Technical qualification of every outside engineering firm we work with, building a pool of trusted partners so this isn’t repeated from scratch each time.
• Our technical standards and equipment catalogue, built from the ground up — a direct outcome of the real plants you’re already building, not a side project.
• The engineering platform that turns a verified design into working drawings and documentation, fast.
• The safety case for every plant: process hazard studies built into every design from day one, and your own sign-off before any gas is introduced.

Why this role, and why now

Most senior engineering roles ask you to operate inside a rulebook someone else already wrote. This one asks you to write it — while real plants, real capital, and real safety cases are already in motion. In your first year, you’ll qualify the engineering partners we work with, adopt and interpret international and Indian codes for situations we don’t yet have our own standard for, and turn what those first live projects prove out into the standards the next ten plants will run on. If you’ve ever felt constrained by a standards library that was already complete before you arrived, or wished you’d been in the room when the foundational decisions were actually made — this is that room.

What we’re looking for

• Deep, hands-on engineering judgement, not a job title.
• Fifteen to twenty years in process, chemical, or mechanical engineering, with real independent design-authority or owner’s-engineer experience — not only design production inside an EPC or engineering-services firm.
• Genuine comfort with process safety (HAZOP, LOPA, SIL), and with making a binding engineering call when the standard you’d like to point to doesn’t exist yet.
• A track record of holding an engineering line under real commercial or schedule pressure, with enough fluency in cost and schedule consequence to be taken seriously by the people who feel that pressure hardest.
• A background in industrial gases is a strong plus, but we’re just as open to refining, petrochemicals, fertilisers, hydrogen or ammonia EPC, or any comparably hazardous, safety-critical process industry — what matters far more is whether you’ve actually held independent design authority, not the specific industry.
• Comfortable directing technical teams and evaluating modern engineering tools on their own merits — you don’t need to write code yourself, but you should know good engineering software when you see it, and not default to whatever’s conventional just because it’s familiar.

Compensation is structured to reflect the seniority and scarcity of this role — competitive fixed pay alongside meaningful incentive/upside participation, so the outcome of building this well is genuinely shared, not just delivered.