Lead Test Engineer

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 owns 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. You own the 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 doing: thermocouples, pressure transducers, accelerometers, speed probes, emissions measurement, and the DAQ behind them. You will write the test procedures, run the hazard reviews, define the abort limits, and enforce them when it's tempting not to. Then you run tests, fast: turn the stand around between builds in hours, not weeks, reduce the data the same day, and tell the design team where reality disagrees with the model. Test rate is the company's iteration speed. What We're Looking For You have tested 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). 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, and 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.