Engineering Generalist

About Tachyon

Particle accelerators sit at the center of some of humanity's most important industries. They are used to test spacecraft electronics, manufacture medical isotopes, inspect critical infrastructure, advance fusion research, probe new materials, and explore fundamental physics. Yet despite their importance, accelerator technology has remained largely confined to national laboratories, universities, and bespoke (but enormous) government programs. Tachyon Industrial was founded to change that.

We are building a High Energy Physics Prime, the first venture-scale industrial accelerator company: a vertically integrated business focused on designing, manufacturing, and operating the next generation of particle accelerator infrastructure. First to use them for testing electronics, but eventually to use them to produce antimatter to build propulsion systems to take us beyond low earth orbit.

The Role

We're looking for a generalist engineer to be one of the first technical hires at Tachyon. This isn't a role with a fixed job description. Rather it's a role for someone who can look at an open problem (an RF structure that needs fabricating, a vacuum system that needs designing, a test stand that needs commissioning, a vendor that needs vetting) and just go get it done, with minimal hand-holding and a bias toward action.

You'll work across electrical, mechanical, and systems-level problems as we build out our prototype test stand and first machine. There's no playbook, so you'll be helping write it.

What you'll do

• Own technical problems end-to-end: from first-principles analysis through design, procurement, fabrication oversight, and commissioning

• Work across disciplines — RF systems, vacuum, magnets, controls, mechanical integration — as the machine demands, rather than staying in a single lane

• Identify what needs to get done before being told, and prioritize ruthlessly given a small team and constrained budget

• Find creative, resourceful solutions when the "right" answer is too expensive, too slow, or doesn't exist yet

• Work directly with national lab partners, vendors, and Tachyon's founders

• Help build the technical culture and practices of the company as an early hire

What we're looking for

• BS/MS/PhD in Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a closely related field

• A track record of high competence: strong fundamentals plus evidence you can actually build things that work

• High agency: you don't wait for a fully scoped ticket. You can take a fuzzy goal and run with it, and you flag the things nobody asked about yet

• Moves fast, with urgency: you treat the schedule as real, not aspirational; default to shipping a working answer this week over a perfect one next quarter, and don't let a problem sit idle waiting for someone else to unblock it

• Creativity under constraint: you find a way when resources are tight, rather than waiting for more of them

• Ambition: you want to work on hard, consequential engineering problems, not maintain the status quo

• A collaborative style: this is a small team so how you work with others matters as much as what you build alone

• Courage paired with judgment: willing to make a call and own it, but knows when to slow down, ask, or test before committing

Nice to have (not required)

• Experience with accelerator technology, RF systems, vacuum systems, or precision instrumentation

• Background in a hardware startup or other resource-constrained engineering environment

• Hands-on fabrication, machining, or lab experience

Why Tachyon

You'd be one of the first engineers on a team building real hardware for underserved, high-stakes markets, from sensitive national security to exploring the outer planets. The work is technically deep, the team is small enough that your fingerprints will be on everything, and the timeline is real: we're aiming to have a working machine in the next 24 months.

Our future is in the stars but we won't get there without new physics and machines to tame them. Make your mark at Tachyon on this quest for a more exciting future.