About the role
Senior Research & Development Engineer - RDE Location: San Francisco (In-person)
Who We Are Omen is miniaturizing lab-grade spectroscopy into field-deployable embedded sensors. Our systems deliver PPM-level trace analysis reports on the fluids in industrial machines and datacenters, allowing us to detect complex wear trends like bearing failures or coolant contamination in real-time. With this data we can automatically match anomalies with failure modes weeks to months before catastrophic failure occurs. Our team is a tightly knit group of ~20 builders, dropouts, and industry veterans. We don’t build things that are good enough, we build things that are 100x better.
The Challenge We are currently developing two primary systems: Omen Scout: for closed-loop hydraulic and lubricating oils. Omen Sentry: for direct-to-chip liquid cooling loops (typ. water/glycol mixtures). While our early-stage prototypes have proven the core viability of our spectroscopy techniques, we need an R&D Engineer to act as our primary explorer. You will focus on the fundamental physics of our optical and fluidic systems, proving out new sensing modalities and taking early concepts from whiteboards to working benchtop prototypes.
What You Will Do Proof-of-Concept Development: Build and iterate early-stage benchtop rigs to validate enhancements to our core tech (optics, fluid handling, plasma generation) or explore new sensing modalities to add to our portfolio (e.g., bio-sensing, turbidity, viscometry). Push the Science: Identify the physical limits of our spectroscopy techniques e.g. figure out exactly when and why an optical window fouls or a plasma arc destabilizes in dirty fluids, and devising the fundamental workarounds. SoTA Scouting: Keep a constant pulse on the state-of-the-art in fluid sensing, photonics, and physical chemistry.
What We Are Looking For Deep theoretical and practical knowledge in applied physics, optical engineering, or physical chemistry. Action biased i.e. prefers building a rough prototype to test a hypothesis more often than not. Zero-to-One type individuals. First-principles problem solving that relies on fundamental physics rather than off-the-shelf reference designs. Ability to use both ECAD and MCAD is a must. We use Altium and Solidworks respectively. Prior experience in other fields of spectroscopy is a plus
Why Omen? We take the physics seriously, but we don’t let red tape slow us down. If you want to own a fascinating hardware problem from the ground up and build something that protects the most expensive infrastructure on the planet, we want to talk to you.