Junior Mechanical Engineer

Golden Gate Recruiting; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 70,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

Golden Gate Recruiting is hiring for American Turbines in San Francisco. The Junior Mechanical Engineer will turn a running turbine core into a deployable product, designing enclosure components and mechanical systems, from CAD to release drawings, then assisting on the shop floor to build and test.

Early-career engineers will see a machine evolve from bench parts to a field-ready product, with hands-on exposure to precision manufacturing, assembly, and verification in a rapidly growing

Qualifications

• Degree in mechanical engineering or equivalent hands-on background.
• 0–3 years of experience.
• Strong CAD fundamentals and GD&T.
• Evidence of building parts through internships, projects, or hands-on work.

Responsibilities

• Design shippable pieces of the machine (enclosure, baseplate, vibration isolation, lift provisions).
• Take CAD models through released drawings.
• Collaborate with the integration lead and shop floor during build and testing.
• Contribute to scaling clustering and serviceability for field deployment.

Skills

CAD fundamentals

GD&T

materials selection

machining

sheet metal

welding

hand tools

assembly and testing

Education

Bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering

Tools

SolidWorks

NX

Job description

Golden Gate Recruiting is thrilled to be hiring for American Turbines, a seed-stage hard tech company in San Francisco backed by the investors behind SpaceX, Boom Supersonic, and Hadrian!

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.

Location and work authorization

• This role is fully on-site in San Francisco (Dogpatch). You must live in the SF Bay Area or be open to relocating to San Francisco.
• Visa sponsorship and visa transfers are not offered for this role. Applicants must be authorized to work in the US without sponsorship.