Boots on the floor
Everyone visits plants. Product decisions made without seeing a shakeout line are guesses with confidence.
Work where themetal is stillmolten.
Smelteon is built by people who are willing to put on boots and safety glasses. If you want to build AI that moves real machines in hot, hazardous, high-consequence environments, this is the place.
[PLACEHOLDER] Roles are illustrative of the founding team Smelteon is assembling.
8Open roles
On-sitePlants, not slides
Pre-seedStage
Software thatcan hurt someoneif you get it wrong.
Most AI products fail by being unhelpful. Ours would fail by moving a robot near molten metal without an approved window. That constraint changes how you build: slower to write, faster to trust, and impossible to fake in a demo.
- Your code runs beside a PLC at 1,400°C, not in a browser tab
- Every action you ship is logged, attributable and reversible
- Ground truth comes from X-ray, CT and scrap tickets, not from vibes
- You will be in a foundry within your first month
Six operatingprinciples.
Measure the baseline first
We never claim an improvement without a baseline captured against the customer's own records.
Ship behind gates
Golden sets, twin scenario tests and safety reviews gate promotion. Nobody ships to a furnace on a Friday hunch.
Say the uncomfortable number
If the model is not accurate enough for assist mode, we say so to the customer before they ask.
Small teams, whole problems
You own a wedge end to end — perception, plan, connector, evidence — rather than a slice of a pipeline.
Respect the craft
The pourer with thirty years of judgement is a teacher, not a legacy system to be replaced.
Eight roles.All of themconsequential.
We hire slowly and pay competitively for the risk profile of a pre-seed Physical AI company.
Engineering · On-site (foundry travel) · Full-time
Staff Controls Engineer — Foundry Edge
Own the write-back path: OPC UA and vendor integrations to induction furnaces, molding lines and auto-pour systems, bounded setpoint control, rollback and the failure mode of every connector.
Engineering · Hybrid · Full-time
Computer Vision Engineer — Pour & Defect
Build pour-stream, mold-state and shakeout vision models and the X-ray, CT and DICONDE pipelines behind Poreon. Real-time inference on Jetson, evaluated against plant ground truth.
Product · On-site · Full-time
Metallurgist in Residence
Translate melt chemistry, inoculation, gating and solidification craft into process windows, golden sets and agent behaviour. The domain conscience of the product.
Engineering · Hybrid · Full-time
Simulation Engineer — Castwin
GPU-accelerated fill and solidification simulation in an Omniverse-backed foundry twin, fast enough to test variants against a live line and promote setpoints before the pour.
Field Engineering · Travel-heavy · Full-time
Forward Deployed Engineer
Live in plants. Install the edge runtime, baseline the wedge cell, run the golden-set review and get the first number to move. The role that decides whether pilots convert.
Go-to-market · Hybrid · Full-time
Founding Account Executive — Foundry Groups
Sell to plant directors with metallurgists as champions and EHS as approvers. Land one cell, prove the number, expand the group.
Quality · Hybrid · Full-time
Safety & Assurance Lead
Own the autonomy gates, safety review process, IATF 16949 and AS9100 evidence model and the audit log that makes bounded control defensible.
Engineering · Remote (EU/US) · Full-time
ML Platform Engineer — Edge Fleet
Triton serving, model routing, staged promotion, rollback and federated fleet updates across a managed multi-site Jetson and factory-server fleet.
Four steps,two weeks,one answer.
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Intro call
Thirty minutes with a founder on what you have built, what you want to build and whether the foundry context genuinely interests you.
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Technical or domain deep dive
A working session on a real Smelteon problem — a control boundary, a defect attribution, a connector failure mode — not a whiteboard trivia round.
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Plant conversation
A conversation grounded in a real plant scenario, with a metallurgist or forward-deployed engineer in the room.
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Offer
Decision and offer within two working days of the final conversation. We do not run silent pipelines.
What we offer.
- Equity
- Meaningful equity for every early hire, with a standard four-year vest and a one-year cliff.
- Salary
- Competitive for a pre-seed Physical AI company in your market; we benchmark rather than negotiate hard.
- Travel
- Plant travel is part of the job for most roles and is fully covered, including safety equipment.
- Equipment
- Whatever you need, including edge development hardware at home if your work needs it.
- Learning
- Foundry training and metallurgy education budget — we expect engineers to learn the domain properly.
- Time off
- Generous and actually taken; shift-adjacent roles get recovery time after on-site deployments.
Three kinds ofpeople.
The engineer who wants consequence
Engineering
You are bored of shipping features nobody can point at. Here, your code changes the temperature of metal and the safety of a person standing beside it.
The metallurgist who wants leverage
Domain
You have spent years holding a process window in your head. Here, that judgement becomes a model that runs on every heat, in every plant.
The operator who likes plants
Field
You would rather spend a week on a shakeout line than a week in a strategy offsite. That instinct is the job description.
2 wks
Typical hiring cycle
4
Interview steps, no more
1 mo
Until your first plant visit
100%
Roles with real ownership
Before you apply.
For engineering roles, no — curiosity and willingness to be on a plant floor matter more. For the metallurgist and safety roles, deep domain experience is the role.
Partly. Platform and ML roles can be hybrid or remote within EU and US time zones. Controls, field engineering and domain roles require significant plant time.
Write to us anyway at careers@smelteon.com with what you would build here. Early-stage teams reshape roles around exceptional people.
Apply.
Send your work, a plant you have stood in, or the problem you want to own to careers@smelteon.com.