Director of Engineering - Industrial Systems & Product Platform Development

Pacific Search Firm has been retained by our client, a growing leader in the green industrial gas space, to find their first Director of Engineering — Industrial Systems & Product Platform Development Our client is rebuilding carbon dioxide supply for reliability. Problem: North America's CO₂ supply is shrinking and it's already fragile. CO₂ has always been a byproduct, not a product captured from refineries, ethanol plants, and chemical plants that were never built with CO₂ customers in mind. That feedstock dependency means supply is heavily centralized in the middle of the country, leaving coastal and western markets to rely on expensive, inefficient, and failure-prone rail shipments from a handful of mega-plants. Our client’s solution: Our client is developing a network of small-scale production facilities that recover biogenic carbon dioxide from renewable natural gas operations and convert it into beverage-grade liquid CO₂. By locating production close to regional demand, aiming to create a more reliable and resilient alternative to the traditional long-distance CO₂ supply model. Our client is hiring its first Director of Engineering — Industrial Systems & Product Platform Development to define the engineering foundation of the company’s industrial physical product platform from the ground up. Reporting directly to the COO, you'll own the design requirements, systems architecture, and technical baseline for every future carbon dioxide production unit, turning lessons from the company’s first plant into a repeatable playbook, then build the internal engineering team to execute it. The Technology: Our client's carbon dioxide production units recover CO₂ from renewable natural gas upgrading facilities and purify and liquefy it to beverage-grade quality — integrating compression, purification, refrigeration, instrumentation, and controls into a compact, standardized platform. Our client's edge isn't inventing proprietary equipment; it's owning the system architecture, requirements, and technical baseline that turn best-in-class components into one coherent, continuously-improving product. The company’s initial facilities provide the operating data; now the job is separating what should stay standard from what should evolve, and building the internal ownership to do that systematically as our client scales to dozens of sites.