Founding Equipment Engineer

Apply on YC · Original job listing

• Role: Engineering / Chemical engineering
• Experience: 1+ years
• Visa: Will sponsor

The Problem

Our models today are proposing new materials and synthesis recipes faster than any lab on earth can validate them. Many of these materials and recipes are dead ends, but a few are genuinely interesting and could lead to a novel breakthrough.

The role

As a Founding Equipment Engineer at Discovered Materials, you will:

• Set up our deposition and characterization tools.
• Design the customizable hardware that makes new synthesis approaches possible — sources, gas delivery, vacuum, thermal, motion
• Build synthesis equipment with in-situ characterization capabilities with the ability

You will thrive here if:

• You've built or substantially modified vacuum and deposition hardware.
• You've designed deposition and characterization tools from scratch for new materials
• You enjoy working with fast-paced, ambitious teams and on problems with no written playbook

Who we are

We’re Advaith and Akash. Akash has a PhD in Material Science from Stanford University, and has spent the last 11 years researching new materials for semiconductor chips. His work on new nanoscale interconnects was Stanford Engineering’s most popular story of 2025. Advaith studied AI at Carnegie Mellon and was a research engineer building video models and agents at Persona AI (acquired) and Luma Labs. We met over 10 years ago at IIT-Madras. We’re backed by Lightspeed, Y Combinator and angels from Anthropic and OpenAI