Senior Materials Engineer (Metal 3D Printing)

About this role

SENIOR MATERIALS ENGINEER (METAL 3D PRINTING)

Freeform builds AI-native manufacturing systems that unify software, hardware, and physics to produce industrial-scale parts at the speed of human ideation. By treating manufacturing as a single integrated system, we unlock a new era of innovation where complex hardware is designed, built, and scaled without limits.

As a Senior Materials Engineer at Freeform, you will have the unique opportunity to establish the company’s M&P infrastructure, strategy, and best practices for our advanced metal 3D printing technology. We are looking for someone with solid fundamentals in materials engineering, an understanding of metals, and a keen interest in working on the cutting edge of additive manufacturing development. In this role, you will own materials engineering efforts from cradle to grave, including hands-on sample testing, analysis of findings, and strategic process improvements. If you want to make an impact at a rapidly growing company that’s revolutionizing metal additive manufacturing, we’d love to hear from you!

Success here doesn't hinge on 3D printing experience. Instead, we seek intelligent, motivated, and collaborative engineers who thrive on solving challenging problems and creating groundbreaking technology!

Responsibilities:

• Establish Freeform’s M&P best practices, and materials testing infrastructure and strategy

• Operate equipment to measure material properties such as tensile strength, surface roughness, and microstructure

• Generate and track quality metrics of printed customer parts such as dimensional accuracy, defect distribution, and surface roughness

• Organize, analyze and interpret data and present key findings

• Work with process development team to tie key materials findings into improvement of upstream printing processes, including training our advanced machine learning models

• Establish and optimize processes and procedures for measuring and quantifying material quality

• Create automation for M&P procedures to take human out of the loop

• Strategize continuous improvement plans to enhance system performance, reliability, and scalability

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in material science, materials engineering, metallurgy, or mechanical engineering

• 7+ years of professional materials engineering experience (with at least three years in metals)

• Experience developing and optimizing metallurgical sample preparation techniques such as cutting, grinding, polishing, acid etching, and optical microscopy

Nice to Have:

• Master’s or PhD in in material science, materials engineering, metallurgy, or mechanical engineering highly preferred

• 10+ years of materials engineering experience

• Experience with metal additive manufacturing highly preferred

• Experience with laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) processes

• Experience in process development

• Experience operating complex materials equipment

• Familiarity with processing large datasets and statistical data analysis software such as R, JMP, or Minitab

• Passion for improving the state of metal 3D printing

Location:

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Based in Hawthorne, our vertically integrated facility brings technology development, R&D, and production together under one roof. We operate at the center of LA’s deep tech ecosystem, surrounded by some of the most ambitious hardware innovation happening anywhere in the country.

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Our fast-paced, cross-functional environment is built on close collaboration, and as such, this role requires full-time onsite presence (five days a week), with very limited exceptions.

What We Offer:

• We have an inclusive and diverse culture that values collaboration, learning, and making deliberate data-driven…