Forward Deployed Engineer

EH Group; Houston (TX); On-site; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation with equity

Relocation support to Houston, Texas

First seat in growing function

Job summary

EH Group in Houston is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to be the technical lead for site design, proposals and bankability assessments for data center opportunities. You will own site planning, CAD-based technical design and compelling technical proposals, aligning multi-party requirements (customer, EPC, gas supplier and financiers) while building scalable templates and a reusable content library.

The role requires travel to customer sites and partners, sits with the US operations hub, and

Qualifications

• Engineering degree and 8+ years of engineering practice.
• Strong hands-on CAD skills with ability to produce drawings.
• Data center or industrial power design and development experience.
• Customer-facing track record and ability to present to external stakeholders.
• Strong technical writing and ability to craft proposals for external readers.

Responsibilities

• Site planning: coordinate layouts, interconnections and siting with the customer and EPC.
• Technical design: own CAD models, balance of plant interfaces and system configuration.
• Technical proposal writing: author responses for RFIs/RFPs and technical sections of contracts.
• Collaborate with Swiss engineering to feed product roadmap and standards.

Skills

Engineering design

CAD software

Data center experience

Customer-facing

Technical writing

Project planning

Education

Engineering degree (mechanical, electrical, chemical or civil)

Job description

Full-time, onsite | Houston, Texas | Travel to customer sites, partners and our Swiss HQ

Demand is not our problem. We have a GW-scale pipeline of US data center customers, and what they need from us now is the design, the proposal and the proof that the project is bankable. Could you be the engineer who delivers it?

About EH Group

EH Group (EHG) is a rapidly growing fuel cell power platform that provides onsite power solutions to data centers, defense and industry, and mobile power solutions to the aviation and maritime sectors. We offer fuel-agnostic proton exchange membrane (PEM) systems running on natural gas, biogas or hydrogen, with options for integrated carbon capture and heat recovery. Following a recently announced major investment round, EHG is expanding from its founding in Switzerland into the US, fueled by a GW-scale, late-stage pipeline of US data center customers.

About The Role

We are hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to be our technical and site design expert in front of data center customers and partners. Three things sit in the job: site planning, technical design and technical proposal writing.

Near enough every data center developer we meet wants what we have. What they want from us is a proposal, a technical design their engineers can put through diligence, and proof that the project is bankable. Nobody owns producing those today. That is the seat we are creating, and you will build the system that makes it repeatable.

These deals are multi-party and deeply technical: the customer, their EPC, the gas supplier, their financing partners and sometimes the utility. Our scope has to integrate into the customer's whole site plan. You will be the person who makes that fit, on paper and in the room.

This is the first hire in a function we expect to grow. You will set the templates, the design standards and the proposal library that everyone after you uses, and you will help us work out how the function should scale.

The role is based in Houston, Texas, alongside our US operations hub and manufacturing site, with travel to customer sites, to partners and to our Swiss HQ.

What you will own

Site planning

• Work with the customer and their EPC on where our systems go: layout, footprint, clearances, electrical and gas interconnection points, hydrogen and reformer siting, and constructability.
• Integrate our scope into the customer's overall site plan alongside the other parties on the project.
• Surface the site-specific constraints that change the design or the price early, before they become a late surprise in diligence.
• Build reference layouts for common data center configurations so every new opportunity starts from a template.

Technical design

• Own the CAD models and technical drawings for each opportunity: system arrangement, reformer integration, balance of plant and interfaces.
• Map the customer's technical specifications onto our technology and our reformers, and produce the compliance view: what we meet, what we meet differently, and what needs a deviation.
• Size and configure systems against the customer's load profile, redundancy requirements and availability targets.
• Own the technical interfaces: electrical tie-in, cooling and heat recovery, controls and monitoring, and the gas and hydrogen side alongside our VP of Fuel.
• Bring customer requirements and recurring design constraints back into our product roadmap with our engineering team in Switzerland.

Technical proposal writing

• Write the technical proposals. This is a named part of the job: clear, well-structured technical writing that a customer's engineering team, their EPC and their financing partners can all read.
• Own responses to RFPs, RFIs and technical questionnaires, and the technical sections of term sheets and contracts.
• Carry the customer's technical due diligence: assemble the package, answer the questions, manage the follow-ups.
• Build the proposal library and content system so the second proposal is faster than the first.
• Supply the technical inputs behind customer financial models: performance assumptions, capex and opex build-up, availability and degradation. These deals are unusually finance-heavy, and the customer's CFO is often our primary stakeholder.

What success looks like in the first 12 months

Illustrative milestones, to be confirmed together.

• Proposal and design production has a clear owner: you.
• A working system in place: templates, reference layouts, a technical content library, and a compliance matrix approach that shortens every cycle.
• Named contribution to deals moving from qualified pipeline to signed order, with a measurable drop in time from customer request to delivered proposal.
• You are running technical due diligence sessions with customers on your own.
• A clear view on how this function scales, including your first hires.

What we are looking for

Must-have

• An engineering degree (mechanical, electrical, chemical or civil) and 8+ years of engineering practice. This is a role for an engineer, and we are firm on it.
• Strong hands-on CAD skills. You produce drawings yourself, in current tools, and you can walk us through recent work.
• Data center or industrial power design and development experience. You understand what a data center needs from its power and how a large power project gets built.
• A customer-facing track record. You have been the technical person in the room with a paying customer, rather than an internal design engineer.
• Strong technical writing. You have written technical proposals, RFP responses or design basis documents for an external audience.
• Comfort coordinating across multiple external parties: customer, EPC, utility or gas supplier, and financing advisors.
• Comfort being the first person in a function, working from a blank page, in a lean company.
• Houston-based, or willing to relocate to Houston.
• Existing authorization to work in the United States.

Strongly Preferred

• EPC background. It is the single most useful thing on a CV for this role: design, constructability and multi-party coordination in one person.
• Project development experience, so a customer's development view is familiar from the inside.
• Distributed generation, gas engine, turbine, fuel cell or onsite power experience.
• Direct data center exposure, hyperscale or colocation, and familiarity with how these buyers run technical diligence.
• Applications engineering, solutions engineering or technical sales experience in a complex, long-cycle capital sale.
• Comfort with the financial layer: you have fed technical inputs into project financial models and you understand what makes a project bankable.

What we offer

• Competitive compensation with meaningful equity.
• Relocation support to Houston, Texas, if needed.
• The first seat in a function that will grow. You will set the standards rather than inherit them, at the exact point where our pipeline turns into signed orders.

EH Energy is an equal opportunity employer. We value a diverse workforce and an inclusive culture, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.