Building Engineering Lead or Zurich

About You

The Building Engineering Lead will be Optiml’s senior Subject Matter Expert (SME) for building engineering, responsible for how buildings, systems, and costs are represented, structured and reasoned about across Optiml’s products and deliveries.

You will define the engineering logic, assumptions, and accuracy levels that underpin Optiml’s product tiers. Ensuring our strategies are technically credible, scalable across geographies, and defensible with enterprise clients. Our ambition is to handle any building typology, up to complex, large-scale assets, with appropriate and transparent accuracy.

Working across Product, Delivery, and Engineering, you will translate real-world building engineering practice — including MEP/HVAC systems, digital twins, building physics, Capex structures, norms, and typologies — into clear frameworks that guide product development, client delivery, and long-term roadmap decisions.

About Optiml

Optiml is revolutionizing real estate with our Real Estate Decision Intelligence (REDI) software—a new class of decision technology that embeds AI to help decarbonize buildings while optimizing asset financial performance.

We are an ETH Zurich spin-off that launched our first product in April 2024 and are now scaling across Europe and the US. We recently raised an oversubscribed €8M Seed round to accelerate our growth, supported by leading VCs such as KOMPAS, Planet A Ventures, Innovation Endeavors (the fund of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt), Bit Stone Capital, and The Bau Ventures, along with leading angels.

Built on more than a decade of research and proprietary IP, our platform enables institutional investors, owners, and asset managers to make under writable, forward-looking decisions across the full asset lifecycle — from acquisition to exit — replacing static, backward-looking reports with actionable intelligence.

Trusted by leading organizations across Europe and beyond, Optiml supports capital allocation decisions that balance key financial, regulatory, and sustainable considerations under real-world constraints.

As of early 2026, we are expanding our team to scale our product capabilities and operational delivery as we work to make Real Estate Decision Intelligence the global standard for real estate investment decision-making.

Responsibilities

Building Representation & Engineering Strategy

Lead the development of Optiml’s building engineering coverage across asset classes and geographies.

• Ensure accuracy and reliability of engineering strategies across the full building Capex scope, covering all components, systems, and typologies.
• Define high-fidelity building representations, including:
• Room-level zoning and building physics
• Equipment-level modelling of MEP and HVAC systems
• Large and complex building typologies
• Localised, audit-grade strategies aligned to regional data, regulations, and frameworks

Collaborate closely with Building Representation (including Energy Simulation) and Strategy Development teams to ensure consistency between engineering logic and product outputs.

Shape the building engineering strategy underpinning Optiml’s product tiers and workflows (e.g. Rhino, Grasshopper, Energy Plus, and proprietary approaches), defining:

• Required level of detail and input requirements
• Accuracy expectations and acceptable tolerances
• System boundaries and modelling scope
• Applicability across asset classes, geographies, and data-quality levels
• Alignment with UK RIBA stages (or equivalent frameworks)

Act as a subject-matter expert in best-in-class building engineering practices, coaching teams to balance technical credibility with scalability, data availability, product roadmap constraints, and commercial feasibility.

Standards, Norms & Methodological Governance

• Establish and ope rationalise building component and HVAC engineering standards within Optiml’s products.
• Ensure alignment with relevant standards and frameworks, including ISO, ASHRAE, DIN, SIA, and equivalents across UK RIBA stages or international phases.
• Define, document, and maintain methodological guidelines, assumptions, and reference structures used across products and client deliveries (e.g. baselines, boundary…