Lead Test Engineer

American Turbines; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

American Turbines is seeking a Lead Test Engineer in San Francisco to own the test stand from cold spin to full power. You will design, build, and operate facilities that validate our cutting-edge modular gas turbines for distributed power generation.

You will manage instrumentation, fuel systems, safety protocols, data acquisition, and analysis. You will write procedures, perform hazard reviews, and ensure abort limits are strictly followed during tests to accelerate iteration and learnings.

Qualifications

• Experience designing or significantly modifying a test stand, not just operation.
• Strong instrumentation and DAQ fundamentals with sensor selection and calibration.
• Proficient in data reduction and scripting (Python or similar) to produce actionable results.

Responsibilities

• Own the test stand end-to-end: structure, mounting, fuel system, cooling, protection, and instrumentation.
• Write test procedures, conduct hazard reviews, define abort limits and enforce them.
• Run tests rapidly and iterate: reduce data and compare with predictions to guide design decisions.

Skills

Instrumentation fundamentals

DAQ and data analysis

Python scripting

Gas fuel systems & high-pressure draws

Test safety practices

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 Lead Test Engineer will own the ground on which every design claim gets proven or killed: the test stand. You will design, build, and run the facilities that take our first engine from cold spin to full power, and the rig program that retires combustor and controls risk in parallel. When the machine runs for the first time, you will be the one at the console.

You will own the test infrastructure end to end: stand structure and mounts, fuel gas train, starting and loading systems, cooling, fire and overspeed protection, and the instrumentation that tells us what the machine is actually doing. Thermocouples, pressure transducers, accelerometers, speed probes, emissions measurement, and the DAQ and control room that turn them into decisions. You will write the test procedures, run the hazard reviews, define abort limits, and enforce them when it's tempting not to.

Then you will run tests, fast. Turn the stand around between builds in hours, not weeks. Reduce the data the same day, put it next to the predictions, and tell the design team where reality disagrees with the model. Test rate is the company's iteration speed; you own the denominator.

What We're Looking For

Experience testing high-energy machinery: gas turbines, rocket engines, turbochargers, compressors, or comparable rotating or combustion hardware. You have built or significantly modified a test stand, not just operated one, and you have run hot hardware where a mistake destroys the article or hurts someone.

Strong instrumentation and DAQ fundamentals: sensor selection and placement, signal conditioning, calibration, sampling rates that match the physics. Comfortable with data reduction and scripting (Python or similar) so results come out of the stand as answers, not spreadsheets. Familiarity with gas fuel systems, high‑pressure plumbing, and test safety practices is strongly preferred.

You are calm at the console and disciplined about procedures, but you treat turnaround time as a design variable. You know the difference between a test that produces data and a test that produces a decision, and you have the judgment to stop a test that others want to keep running.