Associate Process Engineer

Arieca; Pittsburgh (Allegheny County); On-site; USD 65,000 - 85,000; Full time

Job summary

Arieca is seeking an Associate Process Engineer to help produce liquid metal-based thermal interface materials and to improve fabrication methods. You will spend significant time at the bench preparing materials, running experiments, and building repeatable processes with traceable QC/QA.

The role includes designing experiments and documenting results for long-term use. You will contribute to DoE studies, write SOPs, and own sample fulfillment from packaging to delivery.

Qualifications

• B.S. in materials science, chemistry, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, or a related field with 1–5 years of hands-on laboratory experience.
• Good laboratory practice and sound measurement practice.
• Chemical hygiene and safe handling.
• Strong analytical skills.
• Strong communication skills.
• Comfort with ambiguity.

Responsibilities

• Prepare materials and samples: fabricate and process our materials based on existing SOPs, prepare test samples following QC/QA procedures, and prepare customer sample sets to specification, and execute production runs.
• Design and run experiments: Define Design of Experiments (DoE) test suites, execute them, and document results so they remain meaningful over time.
• Write SOPs: Support the definition of Standard Operating Procedures for development and production manufacturing.
• Keep the lab running: maintain equipment, calibrate, monitor drift, and manage inventory to prevent run stoppages.
• Get samples out the door: own sample fulfillment end to end including packaging and documentation.
• Improve operations: identify bottlenecks and variation sources and implement fixes within startup constraints.

Skills

Analytical skills

Communication skills

Ambiguity tolerance

Laboratory safety

Hygiene compliance

Education

B.S. in materials science, chemistry, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, or a related field

Job description

Associate Process Engineer

The role

You will make the material that goes to our customers, and then contribute to improvements of our fabrication methods.

Arieca produces liquid metal based thermal interface materials for semiconductor packaging and high-performance electronics. We are a growing team in Pittsburgh, and our customer program relies on high quality material manufacturing and continuous improvement process, that makes the material repeatable with high yield and traceable QC/QA reports. That is what this role owns.

A meaningful share of your week is at the bench: compounding, weighing, mixing, charging, and preparing the sample sets customers evaluate. The rest goes into making that work repeatable; running designed experiments to find what drives quality, building measurement practices that let us trust a number, and turning what we learn into procedures someone else can follow.

You do not need to arrive knowing the thermal interface materials industry. You do need to want to learn it. Our engineering and R&D staff will bring you up to speed on the materials science, the customer applications in AI data centers, consumer electronics and power electronics and Why we do What we do (i.e. why the reduction in GPUs/CPUs junction temperature matters in a data center).

Position Description

Prepare materials and samples. fabricate and process our materials based on existing SOPs, prepare test samples following QC/QA procedures, and prepare customer sample sets to specification, and execute production runs. You own the quality of what ships.

Design and run experiments. Define Design of Experiments (DoE) test suites, execute them, and document the results so they mean something six months later. Analyze what comes back. Perform correlation analysis on the data you collect, review it with the development team, and bring your own read on what to change.

Write it down. Support the definition of Standard Operating Procedures for both development and production manufacturing, so the process survives any one person.

Keep the lab running. Take ownership of the equipment you depend on - routine maintenance, calibration, and noticing when something has started to drift before it costs you a batch. Manage lab inventory so a run never stops for a missing consumable.

Get samples out the door. Own sample fulfillment end to end: packaging, documentation, and making sure the right material reaches the right customer on time.

Improve operations. Find the bottlenecks, the sources of variation, and the steps that waste time, and fix them within the constraints of a startup.

Key Requirements and Responsibilities

• B.S. in materials science, chemistry, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, or a related field, and 1-5 years of hands-on laboratory experience.
• Good laboratory practice and sound measurement practice. You handle samples, label them, log them, and calibrate what you measure with them; by habit.
• Chemical hygiene and safe handling. You are comfortable working with materials, follow hygiene and PPE practice without being reminded, and take housekeeping seriously in a shared lab.
• Strong analytical skills. You can take a set of results, find the relationship in it, and say what it means and what you would change.
• Strong communication skills. You can explain to a colleague why a batch failed, and write it down clearly enough that the explanation is still useful to someone reading it next year.
• Comfort with ambiguity. Some of what you need will not exist yet. You will build it.

Bonus points

• Hands-on experience with polymers/elastomers and powders. You have worked with mixers, analytical balances, and rigid powder fillers, and you know the difference between a batch that dispersed and one that only looks like it did.
• Any exposure to thermal interface materials, adhesives, sealants, or filled polymer systems.
• Hands-on operation of TGA, DSC, rheometers, or viscometers.
• Data analysis and programming. Python, MATLAB, or even serious spreadsheet work — anything that lets you handle a dataset without doing it by hand twice.
• Exposure to Six Sigma concepts or other structured process‑improvement methods.
• Experience building QA/QC plans or SOPs from scratch rather than inheriting them.
• Background in semiconductor packaging or electronics assembly, or any environment where a customer specification had real consequences.

About Arieca

Arieca develops and manufactures liquid metal embedded elastomers; a class of thermal interface material that combines high thermal conductivity with the mechanical compliance of a soft polymer. The technology came out of Carnegie Mellon, and we are commercializing it for AI data center semiconductor packaging and high-performance consumer electronics.

We are a VC backed startup working with major semiconductor companies and supported by major strategic partners that are at the forefront of semiconductor industry materials development.

Level: This is an associate-level position. You will have an experienced team around you, clear ownership of your own scope, and room to grow into the manufacturing side as we scale.

Location: Pittsburgh, PA. This is an on-site role, the work is physical and the equipment is here.