Mechanical / Electrical Engineer (Fresh Graduates Welcome)

Most HVAC jobs in Malaysia are about installing someone else's chiller. This one isn't.

We design our chillers to the building's real load and Malaysia's climate, and we write the PLC logic ourselves rather than buying a controls package. Then we're paid a share of the energy that plant saves, every month, for the next twelve to fifteen years. If the engineering is wrong, we carry it, not the client.

That's the whole reason this job is interesting, and the whole reason it's demanding. It's also why nothing goes into a building without a senior engineer's signature on it. That's true of everyone here, on their first day and in their tenth year. You will not be carrying that risk on your own.

We're ten people. We're looking for an engineer in Penang, and we would be glad to take a fresh graduate.

THE ROLE

You'd be the engineer on the ground at a 3,000 RT centralised plant cooling a shopping mall and an adjoining office tower, one of the largest and most dynamic sites we run.

• Run the plant day to day with our site operator: chillers, pumps, cooling towers, AHUs, FCUs

• Chase down what the EMS flags. Our system will tell you a chiller is drifting. It won't tell you why. That part is the job

• Work alongside the building's maintenance team, and keep the line between their scope and ours clear

• Write the monthly performance report. We're paid on measured savings, so the measurement isn't admin, it's the product

Give it a year and you'll know a 3,000 RT plant better than anyone else in the building: how it behaves on a quiet Tuesday and on the hottest Saturday of the year, what each machine sounds like when it's about to give you trouble, and what the data says before anyone else notices. That is a genuinely uncommon thing for an engineer to own this early.

Hours, straight up. Five days a week across a Monday-to-Saturday roster. There's occasional night work too: some jobs can only be done with the system shut down, which means doing them when the building is empty. This is an on-site role, so no working from home. We'd rather you knew all that from the ad than found out in month two.

If you're joining as a graduate, you won't be handed this plant cold. You'll work it alongside people who already know it until you know it better than they do.

WHAT YOU NEED

• Mechanical, electrical or mechatronic engineering, degree or diploma

• Enough curiosity to want to know why a machine is behaving the way it is, not just whether it's on

• Willingness to be in a plant room. This is not a desk job

• Based in Penang, or genuinely ready to move there

That's the list. Fresh graduates are genuinely welcome. We'd rather teach someone our way of working than un-teach someone else's. If you have five or fifteen years behind you, you're welcome too, and there's plenty here that will stretch you.

STRAIGHT ANSWERS TO WHAT YOU'RE PROBABLY WONDERING

Why isn't there a salary range

Because the same seat is open to a fresh graduate and to a senior engineer, so any range wide enough to be honest would tell you nothing.

Here's how it actually works, so none of it catches you out. The first call is with our HR: your background, what you're looking for, and we'll ask what salary you're expecting. Give us a straight answer. The person on that call is writing it down, not deciding it. The second conversation is with an engineer, and that's where we find out what you know and what you can do. The figure follows from there.

I'm a fresh grad. Is this really open to me

Yes. What we can't teach is curiosity and the willingness to stand in a hot plant room until you understand something. Chilled-water systems, instrumentation, commissioning, our controls, our EMS: all of that we can teach, and we'd rather teach it properly than inherit habits from somewhere else.

Who's going to teach me

The people who already run this plant, day to day, and our senior engineers behind them, who lead the design work and sign off on everything we build. We're ten people, so you'll know everyone by week two and nobody is too far up the chain to ask.

Will I get my Ir.

We'll support BEM or MBOT registration and pay for the training. The work itself, plant operation, instrumentation, measurement and verification, is the kind that counts towards it. That isn't true of every engineering job you'll be offered.

What's the tech actually like

Our own cloud EMS, thousands of sensors on this site alone, down to individual AHUs and FCUs, and an AI layer that flags equipment running off-normal before it fails. In-house PLC logic. If you want to end up somewhere between mechanical engineering and software, this is a reasonable place to do it.

Is the company going to be around

Founded in 2020. Four projects delivered, 5,000 RT of cooling installed, roughly 23 million kWh of measured savings to June 2026 (actual/derived basis). We're still servicing the first plant we built, five years on. ISO 9001 certified, and registered with the Energy Commission as an ESCO, REA and REM.

TO APPLY

Email your CV to [Confidential Information] with Engineer, Penang in the subject line.

No cover letter needed. One paragraph is plenty. If you're a graduate, tell us about something you took apart, built, or worked out for yourself, in or out of university. We're reading for how you think, not for how many internships you had.

ALSO HIRING IN KUALA LUMPUR

If Penang isn't for you but the work is, we're hiring one engineer in KL as well, based at Menara Shell, KL Sentral.

That role runs the other half of the business. You'd follow a building from the energy audit, instrumenting the existing plant and working out where the energy is actually going, through the design, the EPCC build, and commissioning, to the point where it's running 40% cheaper and you can prove it. An audit takes about two months, a build nine to twelve. Travel depends on which stage you're at: light through audit and design, heavy through construction and commissioning. Two days a week from home.

Fresh graduates welcome for that one too. Same address, [HIDDEN TEXT], with Engineer, KL in the subject line.

ABOUT SUSTEN

We're a Malaysian energy-services company. We cut the energy cost of commercial cooling, usually by 40% or more, and clients pay nothing upfront because we or an investor fund the plant. We hold a National Energy Awards 2023 Special Award, two MAESCO Gold Awards 2025 and an SME100 Awards 2025 win; a Kuala Lumpur office tower we retrofitted was named Winner, Energy-Efficient Building in Retrofitted Building, at the 2023 National Energy Awards.