Director, Reactor Tech & R&D Leadership

BIOSPHERE; Oakland (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Unlimited paid vacation and sick/leave

Comprehensive health insurance (incl.

Paid family leave

Gym membership at Pacific Pipe Climb

Job summary

Biosphere seeks a driven R&D leader to manage a multidisciplinary team and execute a technically ambitious roadmap. You will own day‑to‑day priorities, experimental decisions, and delivery within budgets, while growing into higher-risk, higher-reward work aligned with commercial priorities.

You’ll collaborate with senior engineers and capital projects, lead development and validation of assigned technologies, and drive requirements handoffs into plant design and commissioning.

Qualifications

• Have led a complex, multidisciplinary technical team developing and scaling new process technology, in biotech, chemicals, materials, energy, water or another process industry.
• Process engineering experience: mass and energy balances, unit operations, heat and mass transfer, scale‑up, and experience with techno‑economic analysis.
• Are fluent in experimental design and applied statistics: designed experiments, hypothesis testing, sample size and power, and reliability or rare‑event analysis.
• Write and present clearly, to engineers and to funders.
• An advanced degree helps but isn’t required.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow the R&D team
• Execute the milestones on our roadmap: take new reactor technologies and subsystems from proof of concept to validated designs, including pilot-scale reactors and next-generation reactor prototypes for our government-funded programs.
• Deliver validated designs and specifications for the 20,000-liter line, and support installation and commissioning.
• Lead the funded research projects assigned to you through delivery and technical reporting, working with project managers. Contribute to proposals when the work fits our priorities and capacity.
• Make process and techno-economic calls. For example: is it worth more to replace a specialty cleaning chemical with dilute commodity caustic, or to run our cleaning cycle at 65 °C instead of 80 °C?
• Set the standard for experimental design and statistics. For each test, decide what it must show, how many runs that takes and how to analyze it, including for rare events like contamination.
• Build the tools we use to track experiments and characterize failures.
• Run the portfolio of R&D efforts: give each program an owner, budget, milestones and a next decision; rank work by value, remaining cost and delivery risk; stop discretionary work that no longer justifies its cost, and elevate changes to contractual commitments.

Job description

Biosphere seeks a driven R&D leader to manage a multidisciplinary team and execute a technically ambitious roadmap. You will own day‑to‑day priorities, experimental decisions, and delivery within budgets, while growing into higher-risk, higher-reward work aligned with commercial priorities.

You’ll collaborate with senior engineers and capital projects, lead development and validation of assigned technologies, and drive requirements handoffs into plant design and commissioning.