Saronic starts hiring for Port Alpha, and the first jobs are engineers

Nine Brownsville positions are live on the company’s board, the earliest hires for a $3.2 billion shipyard

Saronic Technologies has begun posting jobs for Port Alpha, the $3.2 billion shipyard it is building at the Port of Brownsville, and the first openings tell you what the company needs before it can build anything at all.

Nine full-time, on-site positions are live on Saronic’s job board under the Port Alpha department. All nine are engineering and quality roles: an accuracy control engineer, a production engineering manager, a shipyard build strategy engineer, a shipyard industrial engineer, a shipyard optimization manager, a weld engineer, a site quality manager certified to NDT Level 3, and two roles focused on facilities operations and on integrating outside contractors and trade partners. Several are posted for Brownsville and Austin both, which suggests the earliest work will run out of the company’s headquarters while the Cameron County site takes shape.

Saronic lists 15 openings in Brownsville overall. Cameron County Economic Development circulated the board Tuesday and told residents to bookmark it.

These are not production jobs. They are the people who design how a shipyard runs before the first hull goes into it. Accuracy control and non-destructive testing are the disciplines that keep welded steel within tolerance, and a build strategy engineer decides the sequence in which a vessel gets assembled. Hiring them first is what a company does when it intends to build the yard and the manufacturing system at the same time.

What is coming

Saronic committed to Brownsville in July after weighing sites in California, Virginia and Louisiana. The company chose the port for a 10,000-job shipyard on 835 acres with room to expand toward 4,400, and Cameron County approved a $211 million incentive package built from four parts: $80 million from the Texas Enterprise Fund, the largest award in the fund’s history, $10 million from the Greater Brownsville Incentives Corporation tied to job creation, a county tax abatement running nearly two decades, and a Point Isabel ISD abatement of at least ten years.

The company projects 1,000 hires a year for a decade, an average salary near $75,500 and a wage floor of $25 an hour. It has committed to drawing 35 percent of its workforce from Cameron County. Economic modeling put to county commissioners estimated a $4.9 billion impact and $1.4 billion in annual wages, with roughly 20,000 total jobs once indirect employment is counted.

Saronic was founded in 2022 and is based in Austin. It builds autonomous surface vessels, including the 24-foot Corsair, which carries a Navy production contract worth about $394 million, and the 180-foot Marauder, in development at a former Gulf Craft yard in Franklin, Louisiana. The company is valued at $9.25 billion.

Port Alpha’s first production program will not be autonomous. Saronic won a Navy contract this month to build Landing Craft Utility vessels, the manned 170-ton workhorses that move troops and cargo from ships to open beach. Production is set to begin in 2028.

One caution attached to the postings. Saronic says recruiters impersonating the company have been contacting job seekers, and that its personnel will only ever write from an @saronic.com address, never from Gmail, Yahoo or another free service.