Senior Applications Engineer (PEARL)

Aquatech International•Usa, PA

3d•Remote

About The Position

Aquatech is seeking a full-time Senior Applications Engineer to work remotely or on-site in their Canonsburg, PA, Hartland, WI, or Houston, TX branch office. The role involves developing and improving process designs for the PEARL platform, with technical ownership of primary systems including Direct Lithium Extraction, Eluate Conditioning, Crystallization, and Refining. The engineer will translate new intellectual property into scalable and licensable PEARL process designs and serve as a member of the licensing group’s flowsheet design team.

Requirements

Bachelor’s in chemical, process, or water-treatment engineering
Experience in industrial water treatment, membrane systems, ion exchange, hydrometallurgy, chemical production or lithium processing
Strong process-modeling and mass-balance capabilities
Ability to translate laboratory data, new intellectual property and vendor performance information into scalable process designs
Willingness and ability to build working expertise across DLE, eluate conditioning and crystallization
Proficient in Microsoft products such as excel, word and PowerPoint.
Experience with process flowsheet modelling software (such as Aspen, Metsim, or OLI)

Nice To Haves

Experience with technology qualification, chemical production plant operations and controls process scale-up, early-stage technology development or licensed process platforms preferred

Responsibilities

Develop integrated PEARL process designs and customer-specific flowsheets covering DLE, eluate conditioning, crystallization and product recovery.
Serve as the primary technical owner for eluate conditioning, including impurity management, chemical adjustment, concentration, water balance.
Develop expertise and mastery of DLE, conditioning and crystallization process design and provide technical coverage across all PEARL process blocks as required.
Build and maintain standardized process modules, process-flow diagrams, mass and energy balances, design assumptions, operating envelopes and performance models for PEARL licensing packages.
Work with Applied Development to incorporate newly generated intellectual property, experimental findings and validated process improvements into PEARL design standards.
Identify, evaluate and incorporate well-tested third-party technologies that improve process performance, product quality, recovery, water or reagent efficiency, operability or commercial competitiveness.
Maintain clear differentiation between validated platform design inputs, emerging development concepts and project-specific assumptions.
Assess how variations in brine chemistry, DLE media performance and eluate composition affect downstream technology selection, reagent consumption, water usage, recovery and product quality.
Evaluate and justify process improvements with engineering and economic tradeoff studies to drive down OPEX, CAPEX of the process and improve overall customer economics.
Coordinate with the other PEARL Application Engineers to maintain a consistent and technically defensible end-to-end platform flowsheet.
Collaborate with Aquatech Subject Matter Experts throughout the organization.
Work with Applied Development, laboratory teams, external technology providers and engineering resources to define test plans, interpret results and establish scale-up requirements.
Support opportunity screening, FEL-0 concept development, technical proposals, customer discussions, process guarantees and licensing packages.
Identify technical risks, data gaps and development priorities early enough to support licensing, investment and go/no-go decisions.
Maintain design standards, calculation tools, technology evaluations, decision records and lessons learned for reuse across PEARL projects.
Other duties as assigned.