Mechanical Design Engineer

American Chillers designs and manufactures industrial process chillers and cooling systems for a growing range of demanding applications: industrial process, brewing, medical imaging (MRI/LINAC), battery energy storage (BESS), data centers, and more. We’re a growth-stage manufacturer building custom, engineered-to-order equipment. The engineer who designs a machine here sees it built a few steps away and shipped to a real customer.

We’re hiring a Mechanical Design Engineer to own and accelerate the mechanical design of our chillers. You’ll design the machine itself: frames, enclosures, sheet metal, refrigerant and water piping, and component packaging. You’ll build the 3D models, assemblies, and production drawings the shop builds from, and you’ll develop the new chiller platforms we’re taking into new markets.

This is a design-first role. Most of your time goes to 3D CAD, design calculations, and releasing build-ready designs. The rest goes to backing up our Sales Engineer on non-standard applications, so you understand how and where the equipment you design is used.

We design in Autodesk Inventor and AutoCAD, with Vault for PDM, and we want to model and document our product line properly: configurable master models for our chiller families, clean revision control, and 3D models that feed straight into sheet-metal and pipe fabrication. You’ll help build that foundation and set the standard for how we design.

• Design chillers in 3D. Model frames, bases, enclosures, sheet-metal panels, component mounting, and full assemblies for standard and custom units.
• Route piping. Lay out refrigerant circuits and process-water piping, including valves, fittings, and service access, with fabrication and serviceability in mind.
• Release build-ready designs. Produce production drawings, assembly drawings, flat patterns, and engineering BOMs that the shop and our Manufacturing Engineer build and plan from.
• Develop new products. Take new platforms from concept to prototype to production for markets such as BESS, medical imaging, and data centers. Work with suppliers on compressors, heat exchangers, coils, fans, and pumps.
• Build configurable master models. Turn our chiller families into rule-driven, configurable models (e.g. iLogic or design tables) so a new variant takes hours instead of days.
• Run the engineering math. Do heat-transfer, pressure-drop, structural, and weight/rigging checks that back up your designs, and help codify them into our design tools.
• Design for manufacturing and cost. Work with production to reduce part count, rework, cost, and lead time, and make sure designs flow cleanly into sheet-metal and pipe-bending equipment.
• Own revision control. Check designs in and out of PDM, release revisions, and run engineering changes (ECOs) cleanly, so everyone builds from the current approved design.

• Back up the Sales Engineer on non-standard or first-of-a-kind requests. Answer “can we build this, and how?” and review special requirements before we commit to them.
• Review submittals for design feasibility and join the occasional customer or engineer call when a project needs the designer in the room.

• You own the design. You won’t be one of fifty engineers on a single subassembly. You’ll shape whole machines and product families.
• You’ll build the design system:
  Autodesk Inventor/Vault, configurable models, and a model-to-machine fabrication thread. You help decide how it’s done.
• You’ll see results quickly. Design a unit, see it built on our floor, and hear how it performs in the field.
• The markets are growing and technically interesting: BESS, medical imaging, data centers, and industrial process.
• Direct line to ownership, and an…