Founding Engineer – Temperate

No agencies / recruiters, please

Location: On site in our lab in Kidlington, Oxford, two days per week, plus customer and partner site visits as required

Employment: Full-time permanent

Salary: £65,000 to £75,000 per annum, depending on experience

Reporting to: Sarah Bishop (COO)

Cooling is a market worth roughly $600 billion per year, responsible for around 20% of global electricity consumption, and it has barely changed in decades. Temperate’s radiative cooling system reduces electricity consumption in refrigeration applications, installs without changes to the underlying system, and improves performance in hot conditions rather than degrading. We are building our TRL 5 units now, with the first pilot deployments with major UK retailers and OEMs scheduled for the first half of 2027.

The founding engineer is the person who takes everything Fergus (CTO) has proven in the lab and turns it into products that can be deployed, validated, and sold t means owning the product workstream from TRL 5 through TRL 7: the engineering roadmap, the thermodynamics model, the technical specifications, the manufacturer relationships, and the technical voice in customer deployment conversations.

• Cost per watt of cooling. Own the cost side of Temperate’s primary commercial metric: cost per watt of cooling delivered at deployment scale. Once an innovation has a validated physics basis, you model how it will perform economically at scale and drive product design toward a commercially viable number.
• Innovation-to-product pipeline. Take innovations that have cleared TRL 4 validation in our lab and translate them into the product workstream. Work closely with Fergus to understand the physics, assess practical constraints, and define the development path to a deployable system.
• Product workstream direction. Own the engineering roadmap from TRL 5 through TRL 7: what it takes to get from each stage to the next, what resourcing is required, and where the gaps are. Identify components or subcomponents that are underdeveloped or not getting sufficient attention. Guide the project manager so that all the pieces fit together on the delivery timeline.
• Specifications and requirements. Write all technical specifications across the product workstream: panel designs, system integration, installation specifications for partner installers, and manufacturing briefs. Everything that gets built or procured has a specification behind it that you own.
• Vendor and manufacturer engagement. Be the technical voice for all supplier and manufacturer relationships. Assess vendors against technical requirements, write and review manufacturing specifications, and act as the primary technical contact in all procurement conversations.
• Solutions engineering in customer conversations. Represent Temperate technically in customer conversations that have moved to deployment planning. Once a conversation shifts from the core technology to how a system will be installed on a specific roof, how it integrates with a specific refrigeration layout, or what performance guarantees will look like for a specific site, that is yours.

• MA in Mechanical Engineering.
• You’ve got experience working in thermal systems.
  • Direct experience with thermal systems in a commercial or industrial context: HVAC, refrigeration, heat pumps, heat exchangers, or a closely related application. You need to understand how these systems behave in the field, not just in theory.
• You’ve taken a hardware product from concept to reality.
  • Experience translating engineering concepts into deployable products: you have taken something from an early design or prototype to something that performs reliably in a real environment.
  • Hands-on…