Process Engineer, Brine Systems & Field Deployment

Cetos Water; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 130,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Full benefits

Equity commensurate with impact

New York City preferred

Job summary

Cetos Water seeks a hands-on Process Engineer to own design basis for hypersaline deployments. You will model mass/energy, size equipment, and develop test campaigns from bench to pilot scale. You’ll write SOPs and support field integration with customers, traveling to pilot sites as needed.

You will collaborate with science and engineering teams to ensure robust designs from brine characterization to defensible cost estimates.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of process engineering in an industrial setting.
• Degree in chemical engineering or a related field.
• Experience taking a process from blank sheet to operating equipment and startup.
• First-principles fluency in mass transfer, phase equilibria, and thermodynamics.
• Familiar with SYSCAD, Aspen, Python.
• Hands-on with tools, instrumentation, and a skid that may require troubleshooting.
• Willing to travel to pilot and customer sites, including remote locations.

Responsibilities

• Own process design and modeling: mass/energy balances, flowsheets, equipment lists.
• Develop control philosophies and operating envelopes; participate in HAZOPs.
• Translate brine analyses into test plans and campaigns; own results.
• Write SOPs, run logs, and commissioning protocols for pilots.
• Collaborate with customers and internal teams from design to field deployment.

Skills

Process engineering

Mass transfer

Thermodynamics

Data analysis

Process modeling

AI in engineering

Autonomy

Design review

Travel to sites

Education

Chemical engineering degree

Tools

SYSCAD

Aspen

Python

Job description

Own the process engineering that turns a customer's brine into a working system.

The pilot is commissioned and running. The work now is turning it into systems that run on someone else's brine, at someone else's site. This is a hands-on role, and you will own the design basis for each deployment: the mass and energy balances, the flowsheet, the equipment, the test campaigns behind all of it, and the field work when something does not behave the way the model said it would.

You will work directly with our science team on the underlying extraction chemistry and with our engineering team on hardware that has to survive hypersaline service. You will be in front of customers. You will report to the Head of Engineering.

WHAT YOU'LL OWN

Process design and modeling

• Build and own the mass and energy balances for TSSE across feed chemistries, from bench data through commercial-scale cases
• Generate and maintain PFDs, P&IDs, equipment lists, and specifications
• Size and specify extraction, phase separation, solvent recovery, heat integration, and solids handling equipment for hypersaline service, including materials selection
• Develop control philosophies and operating envelopes, and carry the process side of HAZOPs and safety reviews

Test campaigns and data

• Translate a customer brine analysis into a test plan with defined objectives, measurements, and decision criteria
• Execute those campaigns at bench and pilot scale, and own the data: closure, reconciliation, error analysis, and what it does and does not prove
• Turn results into the recovery, energy, and cost numbers that feed the TEA: $/m3, capex, opex, payback, defensible under customer and third-party scrutiny
• Feed every campaign back into the process model so the next design starts narrower

Pilot and field execution

• Commission, operate, and troubleshoot pilot equipment, hands-on, at our site and theirs
• Write the SOPs, run logs, and commissioning protocols that let someone else operate it
• Diagnose what is actually happening when performance drifts: scaling, fouling, solvent loss, phase separation upsets, instrumentation error
• Work alongside customer process engineers on plant integration: tie-ins, utilities, disposal
• Own the technical content of pilot plans, test reports, and customer proposals

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

12 months in:

• You have run multiple customer brine campaigns end to end, from feed characterization to a design basis the customer trusts
• The process model predicts pilot performance within a defensible margin, and is what we use to scope and price new work
• A design package exists that an outside engineering firm could build from without reinventing our assumptions

WHO YOU ARE

We care more about what you have built and debugged than which industry you built it in. Strong candidates may come from separations, hydrometallurgy, industrial water, specialty chemicals, or hard-tech process development.

• 5+ years of process engineering in an industrial setting, spanning design, testing, and operations. Degree in chemical engineering or a related field. Advanced degrees welcome, not required
• You have taken a process from blank sheet to operating equipment and stayed through startup
• First-principles fluency in mass transfer, phase equilibria, and thermodynamics. You can defend a number without a simulator behind you
• You have built and defended a process model and are familiar with SYSCAD, Aspen, Python
• Hands-on with tools, instrumentation, and a skid that does not want to start
• You have built AI into how you engineer. Named tools, in your own workflow, on real work: modeling, data analysis, controls, documentation
• Rigorous about data. You close a balance before you draw a conclusion, and you know the difference between a result and an artifact
• Highly autonomous.
• You can hold your ground in a design review, with our engineers or the customer's
• Willing to travel to pilot and customer sites, including remote industrial locations

COMPENSATION & STRUCTURE

• Market-based salary for the stage, with meaningful equity commensurate with impact
• Full benefits
• New York City preferred

WHY THIS ROLE

Most process engineering jobs hand you a flowsheet someone else settled decades ago and ask you to shave a few percent off it. Here the flowsheet is still being decided, and you will decide much of it.

The loop is short. Bench result to design decision to installed equipment to field data is weeks, not years, and you will see all four ends of it. There is no layer of people between your analysis and what gets built.

Water is the binding constraint on industrial growth this decade: on mining expansion, on data center siting, on semiconductor buildout, on the energy transition itself. The infrastructure layer that unlocks it has not yet been built.

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Send a note to Shannon at Cetos. No cover letter. Tell us about one process you designed or debugged where the data did not match the model, what you did about it, and what it turned out to be.

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