Sora Fuel: VP of Engineering

company

Sora Fuel aims to decarbonize aviation by converting air into affordable, carbon-neutral jet fuel at scale with no feedstock constraints or adverse impacts on agriculture. Our novel electrolysis technology directly converts captured carbon into syngas without regenerating gaseous CO2, reducing the energy required to utilize DAC-sourced CO2 by up to 90%. This provides an economical pathway to carbon-neutral flight, potentially addressing >2% of challenging-to-abate global emissions.

The company was founded in early 2024 and has already closed two rounds of funding totalling $21 million from renowned toughtech fund Engine Ventures with participation from Spero Ventures, Inspired Capital and Wireframe Ventures. Marc Tarpenning, co-founder of Tesla, has recently joined the Board. Since founding, the team has grown to include scientists and engineers with a broad range of skill sets from electrochemistry and catalysis to polymer science and mechanical engineering. It has also scaled its technology from a bench-scale, academic system to a container-sized system integrating commercial air contactors with electrolyzer cells. We seek to build a diverse, collaborative team that shares our enthusiasm and drive to meaningfully address climate change.

role

We are looking for an individual to lead our engineering efforts as we scale from the current pilot to demonstration plant over the course of the next two years. This scale-up will be the primary focus of the entire team and will require a truly unique individual to lead the effort. Over the course of the next two years, the role will entail building out the engineering team (the rough doubling in headcount that we are considering as a company will largely be attributed to engineering), establishing incremental milestones, overseeing systems and process design, and putting in place preliminary manufacturing processes. This is a diverse set of responsibilities that will require a combination of skills, including management/leadership, systems and process engineering capabilities, and a good understanding of project management complexities in the context of engineering scale-up. Unquestionably, there will be a need for strong communication skills given the need for interaction with the broader team, board members and future investors.

From an experience perspective, we would expect that the VP of Engineering would have a background designing and scaling complete systems / plants based around new technologies. He or she would need to be able to demonstrate experience with power electronics, chemical processes, instrumentation and controls, site selection and commissioning. The specific context of these experiences is less relevant but could include oil and gas plants, chemical engineering, grid scale battery deployments or the like. Our core technology sits squarely within the electrolysis domain but the strength of our science and engineering team in this area lessens the specific need for this skillset for this particular role.

While the technical and experiential background of the individual is non-negotiable, it is imperative that he or she is also collaborative, a good cultural fit and a strong leader.

responsibilities

• Oversee the design, build, development and commissioning of our initial demonstration plant that will directly capture CO2 from the atmosphere and convert that to liquid fuels including final design Sora Fuel’s key unit operations

• Manage the growth of the engineering team from 3 individuals to a 12-15 person team comprising systems engineering, power electronics, process engineering

• Manage EPC relationships

• Develop and execute a detailed project plan (in conjunction with dedicated project manager)

• Support future fundraising efforts

• Develop process and manufacturing practices needed to efficiently build our initial scaled commercial components

• Communicate with the Board and other investors.

• Ensure safety of team and partners

professional qualifications

• We see the most critical requirement as having direct experience overseeing design through deployment of chemical, oil and gas or battery plants

• An advanced degree in mechanical/systems/process engineering or a degree in a closely related field with substantial practical hands on experience in one of these domains

• Alignment with our core values of transparency, diversity, collaboration, valuing people and development, and work ethic