Test Engineer

About the role

At Aircapture, we’re creating and scaling a circular carbon economy to solve what we believe to be the challenge of our lifetime: the climate crisis. We supply commercial and industrial customers with clean CO₂ captured directly from the atmosphere, transforming a climate threat into a valuable resource. Solving a challenge of this scale takes people with different backgrounds, experiences, and ways of thinking. We value those differences and believe they make us a stronger team.

Aircapture is building the next generation of Direct Air Capture machines by iterating through the design-build-test loop to evolve from prototypes to production. You will test at every level, from component-level ALT to full system-level performance and optimization. You have done substantive test work on real systems, take pride in rigorous and reproducible results, and communicate your findings clearly to engineering peers and cross-functional collaborators. If you are a hands-on engineer who wants to do meaningful work at a groundbreaking climate technology company, we want to hear from you.

This role is onsite at our development and production facility in Berkeley, California.

Salary: $130,000-170,000 per year

What You’ll Do Here

- Conduct system-level testing of our DAC systems, including design envelope testing, performance characterization, and operational optimization

- Help define the metrics that describe system efficiency and performance, bridging the gap between high-level OKRs and design-team deliverables with a physics-based understanding of what our equipment actually does in operation

- Plan and conduct HALT and ALT testing programs in partnership with the design teams to de-risk new design concepts, including developing test objectives, designing fixtures, instrumenting the test rig, executing tests, performing analysis, and delivering clear feedback that informs the design process

- Develop a rigorous, data-driven understanding of equipment and part performance and reliability by characterizing performance degradation over time, validating or challenging design-life assumptions, and using these insights to inform predictive maintenance models and O&M schedules

- Translate test findings into actionable feedback for the design and operations teams, accelerating the feedback loops that drive the development process

- Partner across the organization to develop the data pipeline that moves test and operational data from the telemetry system into dashboards and reports that support engineering decisions

Your Skills and Abilities Include

- Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Controls Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Physics, or a closely related field. Master’s degree a plus

- 4–8 years of professional experience in test engineering, systems testing, or experimental R&D, with hands-on involvement in test programs on hardware systems, including test execution, instrumentation, and analysis