Senior Research & Development Engineer Comp + Equity Seed-funded indust

Senior Research & Development Engineer

$210k total compensation ($170k base + $20k equity + $20k other)

San Francisco, USA

You will act as the primary explorer for a 20-person San Francisco team, pushing the physical limits of optical and fluidic systems. You'll transition concepts from whiteboards to benchtop prototypes, solving complex challenges in plasma generation and fluid sensing to protect critical infrastructure like datacenters and industrial machinery through real-time trace analysis.

• Work on "type-two fun" engineering: deeply challenging, fast-paced hardware development where you build systems that are 100x better than existing lab-grade technology.
• Join a high-caliber team of builders and industry veterans backed by $10.5M in seed funding to solve fundamental physics problems in the heart of San Francisco.
• High-impact ownership where your research directly prevents catastrophic failures in multi-billion dollar infrastructure by detecting wear trends weeks before they occur.

• Build and iterate early-stage benchtop rigs to validate core technology enhancements in optics, fluid handling, and plasma generation.
• Identify and solve physical limits of spectroscopy, such as optical window fouling or plasma arc destabilization in contaminated industrial fluids.
• Scout the state-of-the-art in photonics and physical chemistry to explore new sensing modalities like bio-sensing, turbidity, and viscometry.

• Possesses deep theoretical and practical knowledge in applied physics, optical engineering, or physical chemistry with a zero-to-one builder mentality.
• Demonstrates proficiency in first-principles problem solving using both ECAD (Altium) and MCAD (Solidworks) to create functional hardware prototypes.
• Thrives in action-biased environments, preferring iterative prototyping over theoretical modeling to validate complex physical hypotheses.