Junior Mechanical Engineer

American Turbines; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

American Turbines seeks a junior mechanical engineer to turn turbine cores into deployable products, designing enclosure, baseplate, mounts, and mechanical systems for field use. You will take components from CAD through released drawings and assist on the shop floor to build what you drew.

You will own shippable pieces from day one, design for tolerance, source parts, install them, and verify performance on our test stand. This role offers compressed growth in a small, fast-moving team.

Qualifications

• Degree in mechanical engineering or equivalent hands-on background.
• Strong CAD fundamentals (SolidWorks, NX) and a working grasp of GD&T, materials selection, and common fabrication methods: machining, sheet metal, welding.
• Evidence that you build things through internships, projects, or shipped hardware; comfortable with hand tools.

Responsibilities

• Design shippable machine components such as enclosure, baseplate, vibration isolation, and mounting provisions.
• Tolerance parts, source them, install them, and validate on test stands.
• Collaborate with the integration lead and help shop floor build what you designed.
• Help scale hundreds of units from bench parts to deployed field equipment.

Skills

CAD fundamentals

GD&T

Materials selection

Machining

Sheet metal

Welding

Hands-on engineering

Education

Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering

Tools

SolidWorks

NX

Job description

About American Turbines

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: 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.

About the Role

The Junior Mechanical Engineer will help turn a running turbine core into a deployable product: the package, the structural frame, the mounts, and the mechanical systems that keep the machine fed, cooled, and serviceable in the field. Working with our integration lead, you will design real parts of the enclosure, baseplate, vibration isolation, and lift and transport provisions, take them from CAD through released drawings, and then walk to the shop floor and help build what you drew.

You will own shippable pieces of the machine from day one. You will design them, tolerance them, source them, install them, and find out on our own test stand whether they work. As the design matures you will help figure out how hundreds of units cluster, share infrastructure, and get serviced without a crane and a week of downtime. A turbine that runs on a test stand is a science project until someone makes it deployable, repeatable, and serviceable at scale. You will be part of the small team whose job that is.

This is a role for an engineer early in their career who wants compressed experience: at a large company you would touch one component in your first three years. Here you will see a machine go from parts on a bench to a product in the field, and your name will be on drawings all over it.

What We're Looking For

A degree in mechanical engineering or equivalent hands‑on background, and 0 to 3 years of experience. Strong CAD fundamentals (SolidWorks, NX, or similar) and a working grasp of GD&T, materials selection, and common fabrication methods: machining, sheet metal, welding.

Evidence that you build things. Internships with shipped hardware, FSAE or rocketry teams, a shop‑built project you can talk about in detail, anything that shows you have made parts, found out why they didn’t fit, and fixed them. You should be comfortable with hand tools and eager to assemble and test what you design.

You are rigorous about drawings and tolerances but fast, you ask questions early instead of polishing in a vacuum, and you want to learn packaged machinery from people who have shipped it. Exposure to gensets, engines, turbomachinery, or other high‑power hardware is a plus, not a requirement. What we can't teach is urgency and care; bring those.