Temperate
Founding Engineer
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Founding Engineer
Location: Hybrid - 2 days / week on site in our lab in Kidlington, Oxford. Plus customer and partner site visits as required
Employment: Full-time permanent
Salary: £65,000 to £75,000 per annum, depending on experience
Reporting to: Sarah Bishop (COO)
💡 About the Role:
Cooling is a market worth roughly $600 billion per year, responsible for around 20% of global electricity consumption, and it has barely changed in decades. Temperate's radiative cooling system reduces electricity consumption in refrigeration applications, installs without changes to the underlying system, and improves performance in hot conditions rather than degrading. We are building our TRL 5 units now, with the first pilot deployments with major UK retailers and OEMs scheduled for the first half of 2027.
The founding engineer is the person who takes everything Fergus (CTO) has proven in the lab and turns it into products that can be deployed, validated, and sold at scale. That means owning the product workstream from TRL 5 through TRL 7: the engineering roadmap, the thermodynamics model, the technical specifications, the manufacturer relationships, and the technical voice in customer deployment conversations.
🛠️ What You'll Be Responsible For:
- Cost per watt of cooling. Own the cost side of Temperate's primary commercial metric: cost per watt of cooling delivered at deployment scale. Once an innovation has a validated physics basis, you model how it will perform economically at scale and drive product design toward a commercially viable number.
- Innovation-to-product pipeline. Take innovations that have cleared TRL 4 validation in our lab and translate them into the product workstream. Work closely with Fergus to understand the physics, assess practical constraints, and define the development path to a deployable system.
- Product workstream direction. Own the engineering roadmap from TRL 5 through TRL 7: what it takes to get from each stage to the next, what resourcing is required, and where the gaps are. Identify components or subcomponents that are underdeveloped or not getting sufficient attention. Guide the project manager so that all the pieces fit together on the delivery timeline.
- Specifications and requirements. Write all technical specifications across the product workstream: panel designs, system integration, installation specifications for partner installers, and manufacturing briefs. Everything that gets built or procured has a specification behind it that you own.
- Vendor and manufacturer engagement. Be the technical voice for all supplier and manufacturer relationships. Assess vendors against technical requirements, write and review manufacturing specifications, and act as the primary technical contact in all procurement conversations.
- Solutions engineering in customer conversations. Represent Temperate technically in customer conversations that have moved to deployment planning. Once a conversation shifts from the core technology to how a system will be installed on a specific roof, how it integrates with a specific refrigeration layout, or what performance guarantees will look like for a specific site, that is yours.
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🔍 What We're Looking For:
- MEng in Mechanical Engineering.
- Experience working in thermal systems.
- Direct experience with thermal systems in a commercial or industrial context: HVAC, refrigeration, heat pumps, heat exchangers, or a closely related application. You need to understand how these systems behave in the field, not just in theory.
- Experience taking a hardware product from concept to reality.
- Experience translating engineering concepts into deployable products: you have taken something from an early design or prototype to something that performs reliably in a real environment.
- Hands-on understanding of how things get made. We don’t need you to build them yourselves, but you understand how to put together systems, processes, and people to get a product made.
- Experience designing for mass manufacture. You understand how unit economics constrain product design from the outset, and not as a consideration that comes later once the physics is proven. You think in terms of components that need to cost pounds, and your engineering decisions reflect that from the start.
- Experience speaking to customers. At Temperate, our engineers are customer facing. This role is defined by understanding customer requirements and working with customer technical teams to scope and design something that delivers. Only way we get that is through speaking to them yourself.
- Experience working with 3rd parties to get things built. Experience working with manufacturers and fabricators: you have written manufacturing specifications, assessed vendor capabilities, and managed supplier relationships.
Nice-to-haves:
- Entrepreneurial range. This role stretches across thermodynamic modelling, product specification, solutions engineering, vendor management, and site supervision. The right person finds that energising rather than uncomfortable. You will regularly be doing things that do not fit neatly into a job description.
- Technical confidence with interpersonal skill. Temperate's innovation team generates a high volume of bold ideas. Some will not survive contact with reality. You need the technical depth to identify where the gaps are and the directness to say so, constructively and with evidence.
- Quantitative rigour. “All models are wrong, some are useful”. You’re happy to work with incomplete information to give you a direction and refine that direction the more you learn, but you start with a model to give you that direction.
- Practical judgement. You don’t care about making the perfect product. Sometimes we have to accept that good enough is good enough, and you’ve got the instinct for when that’s the case.
- Cost-driven design instinct. You recognise that cost and manufacturability are design constraints. Being successful in this role is being able to deliver on cost and performance without sacrificing either.
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Most important
You do not need to tick every box. We care more about practical engineering judgement, curiosity about how things work, and the ability to operate effectively in an early-stage environment than a perfect CV. If you have built thermal systems, understood why they performed the way they did, and helped make them better, we would like to hear from you.
📋 Role Details
- Employment: Permanent, full-time
- Salary: £65,000 to £75,000 per annum, depending on experience
- Location: Lab in Kidlington, Oxford — two days per week on site
- Reporting to: Sarah Bishop (COO)
- Car: You will need a full UK driving licence
- Working closely with: Fergus Love-House (CTO), project manager (hire in progress)
- Right to work: You must have an existing right to work in the UK. We are not able to offer visa sponsorship for this role.
🤝 What We Offer
- Equity: EMI share options in a well-funded early-stage climate tech company
- Pension: Auto-enrolment pension scheme with a minimum 3% employer contribution
- Holiday: 25 days annual leave plus UK bank holidays
- Learning & mentorship: Access to our founders, mentors and advisors, including experienced entrepreneurs and CTOs
- Cycle to Work: Access to the UK Cycle to Work scheme
- Office perks: Snacks, monthly team lunches and team socials
- Statutory sick pay and family leave: In line with UK requirements
Our hiring process has three stages:
- 30-minute behavioural video call with Sarah Bishop (COO and hiring manager)
- 1-hour in-person technical interview at our lab in Kidlington — with Fergus Love-House (CTO) and a member of our Engineering Advisory Council
- 30-minute culture conversation with Charlie Bilsland (CEO)
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