Sr. Hardware Test Engineer

About Charm

Our mission is to reverse climate change and return the atmosphere to 280 ppm CO₂, profitably. We convert waste biomass into carbon-rich bio-oil and inject it into permanent, underground storage as carbon removal, or reform the bio-oil to produce syngas for fossil-free steel.

Our carbon removal pathway took off in 2020 with initial purchases from customers like Stripe, Shopify & Microsoft. In 2021 and 2022 we delivered thousands of tons of carbon removal via off-the-shelf pathways, and also deployed our first R&D prototype pyrolyzer of our own. In the next 18 months, we'll build and deploy the next pyrolyzer revision, demonstrate our fossil-free ironmaking pilot, substantially expand our operations in Colorado and put thousands of tonnes of CO₂e underground.

We're looking to expand our team of ambitious creative and hands-on engineers, fabricators, operators, and forward-thinking humans. We value psychological safety and collaboration. We take calculated risks and don't sweep mistakes under the rug; instead, we pin them to the wall and learn from them. We value that everyone’s unique backgrounds and perspectives shape their work. We encourage you to read our company values.

Come help us reverse climate change. Gigatons or bust!

About this role

Charm is the leader in carbon removal to date - but we’ve not delivered enough to make a dent on the climate! Charm, and the industry overall, is capacity constrained and needs to scale quickly to hit gigatons of removal and prevent catastrophic climate effects. This role will play a critical part in that story! As our Senior Test Engineer, you will lead the testing program in Colorado to gain the most value from our pyrolyzers and our biomass processing equipment, which are critical steps in our mission to scale carbon removal!

You will be responsible for test planning across our pyrolysis program in Fort Lupton. You will lead a team of several test technicians and eventually junior test engineers. You will collaborate with the engineering managers responsible for the pyrolysis and ironmaking development programs to determine the most appropriate and purpose-driven tests. You will shape our test processes and lead test campaigns to glean the most insights into how to scale both the pyrolysis and ironmaking processes and test countless variables that inform future designs. Your job will be partially hands-on, as you help troubleshoot and build up hardware as needed, and will also involve data analysis and organization. You will work with others to help determine the critical path forward for the company.

Your first project will be primarily responsible for developing and executing the test campaign on our biomass equipment. You will closely track the quality of outputs and life cycle analysis of different biomass processing steps to give us a better understanding of what is possible, and how this behaves in a pyrolyzer. This means you will not only need to develop test campaigns for the biomass processing equipment, but validate the biomass works well in our pyrolysis process. Therefore you will come up to speed on both biomass processing and our pyrolysis equipment in tandem.

Although based in Fort Lupton, you will report to the Head of Development and Testing in San Francisco. You will also have counterparts in the San Francisco office who will be operating similar pyrolysis equipment, and therefore you will build a testing partnership across the two Charm offices. Best and most importantly, your thorough test campaigns will ensure our hardware will be ready to go out and start saving the world!