Senior Mechanical
Engineer

Rebuilding America's rare earth supply chain — from first principles.

Every EV, fighter jet, wind turbine, MRI machine, and data center runs on rare earth metals. Virtually all of it is produced in China using destructive legacy processes that are illegal in the rest of the world. Solcoa is changing that.

The team has developed a new chemistry that converts rare earth oxides into high-purity NdPr metal — the metal inside every electric motor and generator on Earth — cleaner, cheaper, and faster than any existing route. Their Alameda facility is already producing. The next plant goes online at 500 tonnes/year in 2027. Demand already outpaces capacity 3x over.

The metal behind every electric motor, generator, and speaker on Earth.

Solcoa produces neodymium-praseodymium (NdPr) — the rare earth metal that makes permanent magnets work. Without it, there are no EV motors, no wind turbine generators, no MRI machines, no precision defense systems.

The problem: virtually all NdPr is produced in China via legacy molten oxyfluoride electrolysis — a process that is destructive, expensive, and increasingly geopolitically dangerous. Solcoa's novel process outperforms that approach on cost, speed, and sustainability. It's a new chemistry, developed in-house, that has no commercial equivalent in the West.

Solcoa One is producing today. Solcoa Alameda scales to 500 tonnes per year by mid-2027. After that, Solcoa follows at industrial scale in 2028. The roadmap is already funded and running.

MIT-trained. Forbes 30 Under 30. Moving fast.

17 people. Almost entirely technical. No busy work.

Solcoa is a lean, output-driven team where every person is essential. The environment is fast-paced, ambitious, and deeply technical — first-principles thinking and end-to-end project ownership are what the team is built around. Startup experience is valued over narrow specialization.

Own the machines that make the metals.

You'll design, build, and commission the next generation of Solcoa's rare earth reactors — vacuum induction furnaces, tilt casting systems, high-temperature production lines — entirely in-house. This is end-to-end ownership from a blank CAD canvas to metal flowing out of a commissioned system.

Reactors, furnaces, and production lines that have never existed before.

• Design and build novel reactor subsystems, vacuum induction furnaces, and high-temperature production equipment — entirely in-house, from CAD through commissioning
• Own mechanical design end-to-end: concept → CAD → fabrication → prototype → commissioning on active production lines
• Engineer complex systems: tilt casting mechanisms for molten metal handling, high-vacuum systems, automated material handling
• Specify components, tolerances, and materials for extreme environments — high-temp, corrosive, vacuum
• Collaborate with the in-house fab shop and operations team to rapidly iterate and scale new production capacity
• Author procedures, test plans, and safety/operating documentation that the team actually uses

A builder who has shipped hardware in extreme environments.

• 6–10+ years of ME experience designing hardware for high-temp and/or vacuum systems
• Direct experience designing vacuum systems, furnaces, or molten metal handling equipment
• Proven end-to-end project leadership — from first CAD sketch through commissioning
• Proficiency in Fusion 360 (strongly preferred) or SolidWorks / Onshape
• Hands-on with metal machining and a fabrication shop — you know what's machinable and what isn't
• A signal of excellence: top-tier company (SpaceX, Tesla, national lab), strong engineering school, or founding experience

Fast, technical, and respectful of your time.