Senior Alkaline Stack Development Engineer

Role overview:

We're looking for an experienced alkaline electrolysis engineer to take a leading technical role in our Stack Development team. You'll develop our next generation of alkaline electrolyser stacks. Your first focus will be the next-generation Stellar stack, while you carry design learnings across our Stellar and Starbase platforms. You know how stacks work, how they fail, and what it takes to get from promising test results to repeatable industrial operation. This is a hands-on development role with technical leadership responsibilities, not a people-management position.

About the company:

At Stargate, you will be part of a team determined to change the world. We are passionate about climate, hydrogen, and innovation. Our enthusiastic team and pioneering spirit offer the opportunity to work with real purpose. We encourage you to think big and outside the box to bring your ideas to life. As a scale-up, the company will let you shape its structure and processes and give you significant responsibility and freedom in your work. The environment is agile, and we solve problems in an unbureaucratic way.

What does day-to-day look like in this role?

• Lead stack concept development: turn customer and operating requirements into stack architectures and specifications, and resolve trade-offs between efficiency, durability, cost, manufacturability and serviceability.
• Drive the design of cell frames, manifolds, sealing and compression systems, bipolar plates, electrodes and separators, together with specialist teams and suppliers.
• Solve alkaline-specific problems such as shunt currents, electrolyte and gas distribution, gas crossover, contact resistance, corrosion, and mechanical stability under thermal and pressure cycling.
• Define test strategies and acceptance criteria from single cells to short and full-scale stacks. Take part in builds, teardowns and root-cause investigations, and turn the results into verified design changes.
• Work with production and suppliers on tolerances, tooling, assembly and quality controls to bring cost down without giving up reliability.
• Set the questions for structural, thermal, flow and electrical simulations, and check their conclusions against test data.
• Lead design reviews, mentor engineers and guide external partners. Contribute to risk assessments, PED compliance and technical documentation.

Must-have qualifications:

• 10+ years of industrial development experience, including substantial hands-on work on alkaline water electrolysis cells and stacks. Experience limited to balance of plant, academic research or other electrolysis technologies does not replace this.
• A track record of taking alkaline stack designs from concept through prototype testing and validation to production, including root-cause investigation of stack failures.
• Deep understanding of how electrochemistry, mechanical design, materials, fluid distribution and electrical behaviour interact in an alkaline stack.
• Strong knowledge of alkaline-compatible materials, sealing and compression systems, manufacturing tolerances and component production methods.
• Hands-on experience with CFD and FEM analysis.
• Experience giving technical direction and mentoring engineers while staying hands-on.
• A degree in engineering or natural sciences, or equivalent industrial expertise.
• Fluency in English, with disciplined technical documentation.

Nice-to-have qualifications:

• Experience developing pressurised alkaline stacks and validating them under variable load, start-stop, and thermal and pressure cycling.
• Experience with polymer cell frames, injection moulding, integrated sealing and production tooling.
• Familiarity with PED, ASME design codes, hydrogen safety and design FMEA.
• Experience linking field operating data and stack post-mortems to product improvements.
• Experience with alkaline BoP design or downstream equipment such as hydrogen purification units.

Why us?

• You will join a world-class team of 65+ experienced and goal-driven professionals and hydrogen technology experts.
• We are an agile scale-up wishing to make a difference in a field typically dominated by large and slow behemoths.
• We have secured €29m in state aid via the Important Projects of Common European Interest (IPCEI) framework, and are backed by our existing investors such as UGI and Repsol.
• The performance of our ceramic electrode technology has been independently validated by Fraunhofer IFAM in Dresden, and the performance of our prototype stack by ZSW in Stuttgart.

What's in it for you?

• Real influence over stack architecture and engineering decisions, and the chance to see them built as hardware.
• Close day-to-day collaboration with testing and production at our Tallinn facilities.
• While this is primarily a hands-on, on-site role, we offer flexibility where the nature of the work allows.
• You can choose between employer health insurance or sports compensation.
• We organise regular team events and company Summer Days that build camaraderie, collaboration and fun outside of the workplace.

We aim to fill this position at the earliest opportunity, so we encourage interested candidates to submit their applications promptly.