[Hiring] Senior Applications Engineer @AQUATECH INTERNATIONAL LLC

Role Description

Aquatech immediately needs a full-time Senior Applications Engineer to work remotely or on-site in our Canonsburg, PA, Hartland, WI, or Houston, TX branch office. The hours of this position are Monday - Friday, 8:00 am to 5:00 pm.

• Develop integrated PEARL process designs and customer-specific flowsheets covering DLE, eluate conditioning, crystallization and product recovery.
• Serve as the primary technical owner for eluate conditioning, including impurity management, chemical adjustment, concentration, water balance.
• Develop expertise and mastery of DLE, conditioning and crystallization process design and provide technical coverage across all PEARL process blocks as required.
• Build and maintain standardized process modules, process-flow diagrams, mass and energy balances, design assumptions, operating envelopes and performance models for PEARL licensing packages.
• Work with Applied Development to incorporate newly generated intellectual property, experimental findings and validated process improvements into PEARL design standards.
• Identify, evaluate and incorporate well-tested third-party technologies that improve process performance, product quality, recovery, water or reagent efficiency, operability or commercial competitiveness.
• Maintain clear differentiation between validated platform design inputs, emerging development concepts and project-specific assumptions.
• Assess how variations in brine chemistry, DLE media performance and eluate composition affect downstream technology selection, reagent consumption, water usage, recovery and product quality.
• Evaluate and justify process improvements with engineering and economic tradeoff studies to drive down OPEX, CAPEX of the process and improve overall customer economics.
• Coordinate with the other PEARL Application Engineers to maintain a consistent and technically defensible end-to-end platform flowsheet.
• Collaborate with Aquatech Subject Matter Experts throughout the organization.
• Work with Applied Development, laboratory teams, external technology providers and engineering resources to define test plans, interpret results and establish scale-up requirements.
• Support opportunity screening, FEL-0 concept development, technical proposals, customer discussions, process guarantees and licensing packages.
• Identify technical risks, data gaps and development priorities early enough to support licensing, investment and go/no-go decisions.
• Maintain design standards, calculation tools, technology evaluations, decision records and lessons learned for reuse across PEARL projects.
• Other duties as assigned.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s in chemical, process, or water-treatment engineering.
• Experience in industrial water treatment, membrane systems, ion exchange, hydrometallurgy, chemical production or lithium processing.
• Strong process-modeling and mass-balance capabilities.
• Ability to translate laboratory data, new intellectual property and vendor performance information into scalable process designs.
• Willingness and ability to build working expertise across DLE, eluate conditioning and crystallization.
• Experience with technology qualification, chemical production plant operations and controls process scale-up, early-stage technology development or licensed process platforms preferred.

Requirements

• Proficient in Microsoft products such as Excel, Word and PowerPoint.
• Experience with process flowsheet modelling software (such as Aspen, Metsim, or OLI).

Benefits

• Aquatech offers a comprehensive benefits package, including paid time off, company-paid holidays, and a 401K plan (all benefits are based on eligibility).