LOCATION
Emeryville, CA
JOB TYPE
Full-Time
Compensation
$125,000–$175,000 depending on experience
Equity
3-5% + path to co-founder-level equity.
Reporting To
John Slack, CEO
This is an opportunity to unify deep electrical engineering with chemical engineering and help revolutionize the way we produce the building blocks of our society: with the potential to affect billions of dollars of production, billions of tons of CO₂, and billions of people.
For over a century, the chemical industry has relied on a brutal, brute-force approach to manufacturing: using massive amounts of heat and pressure to force molecules to react. It is an energy-intensive process responsible for a massive footprint on our planet. Rhoic is building a radically elegant alternative.
Chemistry is fundamentally just the rearrangement of electrons; we use precisely tuned electric fields to influence chemical reactions directly. Nature has used this exact blueprint for billions of years. Enzymes leverage local electric fields to drive highly selective chemistry flawlessly. Rhoic is the first to engineer this profound natural principle into a fully inorganic, scalable, industrial reactor platform.
Because the electric field drives the reactions, the electrical architecture isn't just a supporting component, it is core to our success. This role exists to build that system from first principles.
Rhoic was founded by builders with deep technical and commercial experience in advanced materials and cleantech. We are venture backed and supported by Activate at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and three separate DOE programs. We have additional support from mHUB, FedTech, and Cyclotron Road. Our advisory network includes world-class researchers in resonant power electronics and electrochemistry.We have a built out lab space in Emeryville CA and instrument access at LBNL’s Molecular Foundry.
We have initial designs for and are building our prototype reactor using a closed-loop electrical/chemical signal during operation which produces chemicals more efficiently and selectively. You will own the electrical direction for the reactor. That means high-voltage power systems, field design, control electronics, and the physics of how the reactor works and scales.
We are pre-revenue. This is a ground-floor role that requires someone to be hands-on building. There is no team under you yet. You will work directly with our CEO (technical co-founder) and have real ownership over the electrical architecture from day one.
The reactor presents a highly capacitive, nonlinear load. The ceramic core’s engineered permittivity produces capacitances of 300–700 nF in the actual reactor geometry. The existing working drive unit operates around ±335V in the low-kHz range today, but the right voltage, frequency, and waveform depend on chemistry and the control scheme and hardware is an open question: the first job is to characterize the load and let that measurement set the operating point. High displacement currents and a load whose impedance shifts with temperature, voltage, and catalytic state make this an unusual high-voltage design problem.
The reaction produces an electronic fingerprint before any product analyzer can confirm it: catalytic activity shows up as a small change in the reactor’s impedance, dissipation, or phase. Detecting that signal cleanly (and trusting it) is as central to this role as driving the reactor in the first place. That fast electrical readout is the feedback-loop the whole program iterates on.
This is a first-of-its-kind system. There is no playbook. When something behaves unexpectedly, (and it will!) the job is to determine whether the problem lives in the electronics, the material, the geometry, or the measurement itself. That diagnostic instinct, the ability to think across domains and isolate root cause under uncertainty, is as important as any specific technical skill.
HV safety procedures, interlocks, and operating limits are treated as engineering requirements at Rhoic.
The near-term goal is singular: improve on the existing architecture to produce measurable performance data that supports scaling and the next round of fundraising. Everything early serves that, and anything that doesn’t can wait.