Development Engineer Co-op — Chemical or Mechanical Engineering

Your Responsibilities

Responsibilities will evolve over the course of the term and are expected to include a mix of the following:

• Partner with technicians, engineers, and PhD-level scientists to design and execute experiments probing fundamental material behavior — wetting and adhesion, surface and interface chemistry, oxide film behavior, coating performance, and thermal transport.
• Prepare and characterize experimental material samples, including liquid metal alloy formulations, protective coatings, and metal–composite laminates.
• Support materials characterization and analysis using techniques such as thermal metrology, microscopy, spectroscopy, and accelerated reliability testing, and help interpret what the results mean for material design.
• Collect, organize, and analyze experimental data to test hypotheses, build structure–property understanding, and support material and formulation decisions.
• Investigate root causes of material-level failure modes — corrosion, dewetting, voiding, interfacial degradation — and evaluate candidate solutions such as surface treatments, coating chemistries, and formulation changes.
• Provide general engineering support across the team as project needs change.

Your Required Skills and Expertise

• Currently pursuing a Bachelor's or advanced degree in Chemical Engineering or Mechanical Engineering.
• A hands-on disposition and genuine curiosity about why materials behave the way they do — not just whether they pass or fail.
• Comfortable moving between different types of tasks and problems in a fast-paced, changing environment — a single week may span wet chemistry, sample preparation, characterization, data analysis, and documentation.
• Strong analytical skills and comfort working with data; mastery of Excel is a plus.
• Clear, organized technical writing ability.
• Demonstrated hands-on experience of any kind — academic labs, personal or maker projects, machining, electronics, coding, or a prior co-op/internship — is valued.
• Interest or coursework in surface chemistry, thermodynamics, heat transfer, fluid mechanics, corrosion, or metallurgy is a plus, but not required.
• A safety-conscious, self-directed, and organized approach to work, including careful handling of chemicals and specialty materials.

What You'll Gain

• Ownership of meaningful work and deep exposure to applied materials science at a growing advanced-materials company developing next-generation liquid metal thermal interface materials for electronics cooling.
• Hands-on experience with a novel materials system at the intersection of metallurgy, surface chemistry, and thermal physics — where the interesting problems live at interfaces, and few of them have textbook answers.
• Experience spanning hypothesis-driven experimentation, materials characterization, failure analysis, data analysis, and technical documentation.
• The opportunity to see your materials insights translate directly into a real product on a live development line.