Wind Turbine Engineer

Computing is hungry for electricity. AI and the cloud consume it faster than land-based grids can supply it. On land, data centres are hitting three walls: available power, freshwater and land.

CIRCEO chose to head offshore. Founded in Nantes in 2025, the company designs autonomous energy ships: hulls carrying wind turbines that harvest the open-ocean wind, stronger and steadier than on land, and power on-board servers cooled directly by seawater. No grid connection, no freshwater draw, no land take.

Behind the project are three founders with a proven track record: Fabien Bardinet (former COO of Aldebaran Robotics, former CEO of Balyo, former VP at Airbus), Boris Morinière (CEA, Airbus) and Michel Soubrier (twenty years at Naval Group, from nuclear submarines to shipyard production).

The roadmap is concrete: a demonstrator, a 16-metre trimaran, with construction starting in late 2026 and launch in 2027, then an 80-metre ship, currently in preliminary design, the first of a fleet built for series production.

CIRCEO is now hiring its first team: the people who will commit everything to opening a territory no one has explored yet. Around twenty people, each working directly with the founders, each owning their system end to end.

The culture taking shape fits in a few words: enthusiasm, shared intelligence and a diverse team, drawn from energy, naval, computing and beyond. Stimulating, brilliant people, maybe a little crazy in places, and genuinely electrifying when they come together around the same problem. Here, we ship machines, not slide decks, and the sea has the final say: every assumption will be measured there.

Want to see more? Dive into the project at www.circeo.earth and explore every open position on the Careers page: www.circeo.earth/careers.

To equip its first ship, CIRCEO is hiring its:

Wind Turbine Engineer

New position – Permanent contract (CDI), based in Nantes, France

Reporting to Michel Soubrier, COO, you take charge of the ship's centrepiece: its wind turbine. A turbine that, for the first time, will have to go to sea.

1. Take a proven turbine to sea: the demonstrator

The starting point is an 80 kW machine, a model more than 40 years old with a solid track record in Northern Europe. Your mission: move it from solid ground to the deck of a trimaran.

·        Reverse engineering: take apart, understand and recalculate what was designed decades ago,

·        Sizing: reinforce the mechanical components so they withstand the dynamic and gyroscopic loads of a ship in motion, with wear and maintenance built in from the design stage,

·        Validation: justify your technical choices, test them on the bench in the workshop, then commission the turbine at sea.

2. Design the 3 MW turbine: the full-scale ship

Once the demonstrator is afloat, you lead the design of a 3 MW turbine for the 80-metre ship. That is the size of a standard onshore turbine, with the technical standards that come with it. This time, the job is no longer to adapt an existing machine but to design one.

3. Go and find the answers where they are

This is not a desk-only job: testing in the workshop, visiting suppliers, working day to day with the electrical, control and naval teams. The best solutions will sometimes come from mechanics outside the wind industry. It is up to you to go and find them.

A mechanical engineer by training, you have at least 5 years of experience. Your background in wind energy is the essential foundation for this role: you know turbines, their components, and what sizing them against wind, fatigue, wear and maintenance really involves.

·        Sizing mechanical parts is what drives you. Your command of design and calculation tools lets you shape the solution, not just execute a specification.

·        Hands-on work appeals to you. No field experience yet? That is not a dealbreaker. The appetite to get your hands into the mechanics is.

·        Your last turbine designs date back a few years? That is an asset: the machine you will retrofit belongs to that generation.

·        You build on proven foundations rather than intuition. AI (Claude, Gemini or another) is already one of your tools, to explore options, check your reasoning or multiply your thinking.

·        English is the team's working language. You speak it fluently, including in fast-paced spoken exchanges.

Above all, and this is the founders' first criterion: you are passionate. About the sea, energy or anything else, it does not matter, as long as it is genuine. Curious in life as in your work, you step outside your scope because you enjoy it, and you would rather bring a solution than point out a problem.

Joining CIRCEO means watching the machine you calculated put to sea. It means working in a team where every person counts and your work shows at the scale of the whole ship. It also means arriving at the very start of the story: the methods and the first fleet are still to be written, with you.

Do you recognise yourself in this description, and does the idea of taking a wind turbine to sea make you want to dive in rather than step back? Then apply under the reference #WindOfChange

Salary and benefits

·        Salary: shaped around your background and what you bring to the founding team. We discuss it openly from our very first conversation.

Process and inclusion

·        1/ With L'Etincelle RH: a phone call + an interview (supported by tools and tests to understand you more finely)

·        2/ With CIRCEO: meetings with at least two of the three founders, Fabien Bardinet (CEO), Boris Morinière (CTO) and Michel Soubrier (COO), plus a technical case study

Interviews can be held in English or French.

The position is open now, with a start as soon as possible : the demonstrator's turbine is on the ship's critical path. If you have a notice period, let's talk, we can work with it.

Gender diversity is a deliberate goal at CIRCEO: applications from women engineers are particularly welcome.

L'Etincelle RH stands for companies open to diversity and difference. Non-discrimination is second nature to us: you can count on our objectivity.