thermal solutions engineer in Kidlington

Location: Lab in Kidlington, Oxford (minimum 3 days/week on-site), plus some remote work and occasional customer site visits across the UK

Contract: Full‑time, permanent

Salary: £50,000–£60,000 per annum (depending on experience)

Reporting to: Sarah Bishop (COO)

Working with: Fergus (CTO), Sarah (COO), product designer (contractor), integrations intern

Car required: Yes

Right to work: You must have the right to work in the UK. We are not able to offer visa sponsorship for this role.

About the role: Temperate is a deep‑tech climate startup building a radiative cooling retrofit that reduces electricity consumption in refrigeration systems and HVAC. We’re at the point where validated technology needs to become real, installed, monitored pilots and we need a solutions engineer to own that journey end to end. You’ll be the technical bridge between our commercial team and our customers: supporting the sell once there’s a warm lead, understanding what’s needed on‑site, translating that into product and integration requirements, and then leading the install and monitoring of pilots. You’ll also bring a design engineering sensibility to the product. You know from the experience of building physical products what it takes to make hardware work in the real world. You’ll work closely with Fergus (CTO) and be the person who makes sure our customers’ systems and our technology actually work together in the field.

What You’ll Be Responsible For:

• Technical pre‑sales: Joining commercial conversations once we have a warm lead; building technical confidence in the solution with customers, answering integration questions, and helping our commercial lead close deals by providing credible, detailed technical input.
• Customer requirements discovery: Visiting customer sites to understand their physical setups, document integration constraints, and define what a successful install will require, producing clear requirements that the entire technical team can act on.
• Integration design & product requirements: Translating customer requirements into product and integration specifications; working with Fergus and contract engineers to define and build the integration approach for each demonstration unit, ensuring what we’re building will actually work on the customer’s system.
• Design engineering input: Contributing to how the physical product evolves: reviewing designs for real‑world fit and manufacturability, flagging integration issues early, and working with our product designer and engineering team to ensure the product installs cleanly and reliably in the field.
• Installation: Leading or supervising the installation of demonstration units at customer sites, including rooftop and plant room environments.
• Demo monitoring: Tracking performance after install, managing any issues that arise on‑site, and feeding structured learnings back to the product and engineering team.
• Knowledge transfer: Producing practical documentation and contributing to handover processes to support the longer‑term technical development.

What We’re Looking For:

• HVAC or thermal applications experience: you will have direct work experience in HVAC, refrigeration, heat pumps, or another thermal application. Knowing how these systems actually behave in the field, including the ability to identify when a partner’s technical claims don’t add up, is essential for this role.
• Degree‑qualified mechanical engineer: a BEng or MEng in mechanical engineering (or a closely related discipline). Postgraduate qualifications are not required, but an undergraduate engineering degree is essential.
• Customer‑facing technical ability: you’re comfortable in commercial conversations, able to explain technical constraints clearly to non‑engineers, and confident representing Temperate’s solution to customers alongside our commercial team.
• Experience building new products: you’ve brought physical products to life before, from early‑stage development through to something that works reliably in the real world. You don’t need to be a CAD expert, but you understand what the development process looks like and you know how design decisions affect real‑world performance.
• Installation and site experience: comfortable in plant rooms and on rooftops; you understand what a commissioning engineer or experienced fitter encounters, not just what the design drawings say.
• Ability to lead and supervise: experience guiding junior contributors (interns, junior engineers, or fitters).
• Comfort with ambiguity: you’re able to make progress without detailed instructions, using reasoning, research, experimentation, and asking sensible questions when needed.
• Based within reasonable reach of Kidlington, Oxfordshire; minimum 3 days/week on‑site in the lab.
• Full UK driving licence (customer site visits required).

Nice‑to‑haves:

• Familiarity with integration variables in commercial refrigeration; refrigerant types, line configurations, condenser layouts.
• Experience in a manufacturing or production environment.
• Prior work at a hardware startup or during a product’s early‑stage prototyping phase.
• Ability to read and contribute to CAD models (SolidWorks or Fusion 360).

Most Important: You don’t need to tick every box. We care more about practical judgement, reliability, and the ability to get things done in an ambiguous environment than a perfect CV. If you’ve built things, understood why they broke, helped make them better, and you want your work to contribute directly to solving a real climate problem, we’d love to hear from you.