Principal Product Manager, Material Science

SandboxAQ; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

SandboxAQ is seeking a Principal Product Manager to own the Catalysis vertical within the AISim ChemSim platform. This lead-level, full-time role is remote in the United States and combines scientific depth with product leadership to translate contractual objectives into concrete features and milestones.

You will partner with Application Scientists, Business Development and external partners to shape a product strategy spanning government-funded programs to commercial offerings, targeting

Qualifications

• 5+ years in product management, including ownership of a technically deep product sold to external customers.
• Strong domain grounding in materials science, catalysis, chemistry, or chemical engineering.
• Track record shipping AI/ML-driven scientific software to external, paying or contracted users.
• Experience contributing to scope of offer, packaging and pricing decisions for technical software.
• Ability to engage both computational scientists and industrial partners, translating requirements into product requirements.
• Ability to reason commercially across multiple end markets and sequence entry.
• Comfort navigating deep ambiguity and translating problems into roadmaps and measurable outcomes.
• Ownership mindset with rigorous operational execution.
• Bachelor's degree in Chemistry, Chemical Engineering or Materials Science or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience in catalysis end markets like refining, petrochemicals, emissions control, or energy-transition catalysis.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end Catalysis product strategy, vision and roadmap, spanning CHIPS Act contractual deliverables, vertical scientific depth, and commercial expansion into new markets.
• Collaborate with Application Scientists and Business Development to understand customer needs and translate into prioritized requirements.
• Translate catalysis objectives into clear product requirements, a vertical roadmap, and evidence for Commerce notices.
• Define dataset and model requirements for chemical coverage and benchmarking.
• Drive the roadmap toward reaction-level modeling aligned with customer processes.
• Contribute to catalysis commercial strategy: segmentation, packaging and pricing.
• Build and manage strategic partner relationships across fabs, suppliers, and labs.
• Define and track KPIs: model accuracy, adoption, revenue growth, OKRs.

Skills

Product management

Materials science

Catalysis

AI/ML software

Commercial strategy

Stakeholder communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in Chemistry/Chemical Engineering/Materials Science

Job description

Principal Product Manager, Material Science at SandboxAQ, United States (remote). A lead-level full time position in the ChemSim team, listed under business operations.

The Opportunity

SandboxAQ’s AI Simulation (AISim) division develops and applies Large Quantitative Models (LQMs) that are grounded in physics, chemistry, mathematics and biology to simulate molecular behavior with scientific precision and accelerate discovery in the physical world across biopharma, chemicals, advanced materials, healthcare, and so much more. Within AISim, ChemSim is SandboxAQ's AI-driven materials discovery platform. We are seeking an exceptional Product Manager to own the Catalysis vertical. This is a dual-mandate role. In the near term, you will be the product owner for catalysis within SandboxAQ's $500M CHIPS Act R&D award from the U.S. Department of Commerce, translating contractual objectives into product requirements and external fulfilment, whilst partnering with Program Managers to ensure successful milestone delivery. In parallel, you will build the commercial foundation that turns catalysis from a government-funded R&D workstream into a product-led business generating durable, recurring revenue from the broader materials and process-chemistry market. Catalysis is one of the largest and most consequential application areas in applied chemistry. It underpins refining and downstream oil and gas, commodity and petrochemical production, emissions control, and the energy transition (hydrogen electrolysis, carbon utilization, e-fuels and chemical recycling etc) alongside semiconductor process chemistry and fine chemical synthesis. Across nearly all of these markets the bottleneck is the same: catalyst discovery and optimization remain slow, experimental and expensive, and the simulation tools available today answer narrower questions than the ones that actually decide a process. This is a once-in-a-career opportunity to shape a category-defining AI platform for materials science at the intersection of national security, scientific discovery, and commercial scale.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end Catalysis product strategy, vision and roadmap, spanning CHIPS Act contractual deliverables, vertical scientific depth, and commercial expansion into new markets.
• Build a deep understanding of customer needs by working closely with Application Scientists and the Business Development team. Synthesize field insights, application benchmarking data, and market feedback into a clear picture of customer personas, and performance drivers, and translate these into prioritized product requirements and specifications.
• Translate the program's catalysis objectives into clear product requirements, a vertical roadmap, and the evidence packages required for Fulfillment Notices to the U.S. Department of Commerce.
• Define the dataset and model requirements for the vertical, chemical coverage, fidelity, and the benchmarking that determines where simulation investment is directed in partnership with our scientific and ML teams.
• Drive the roadmap from property and energetics prediction toward reaction-level modelling, so that predictions can be validated against a customer's own process rather than assessed in isolation.
• Contribute to the catalysis commercial strategy with commercial leadership: customer segmentation, scope of offer, packaging, and pricing model across semiconductor, refining and petrochemical, emissions control and energy-transition customers.
• Build, manage, and own strategic partner relationships at the product level: Work with fabs and equipment OEMs, precursor and specialty materials suppliers, refiners and chemical producers, catalyst manufacturers, national laboratories and validation partners, translating partner requirements into product features.
• Define and track strategic product and commercial KPIs: Manage the metrics that matter most including, Model accuracy requirements, workflow adoption, customer segment expansion, and recurring revenue growth , and drive course corrections against OKRs.
• Develop and defend build-vs-buy and build-vs-partner recommendations for domain-specific scientific engines, datasets and validation tooling.
• Serve as the primary product voice for catalysis to program stakeholders, semiconductor ecosystem partners, and prospective commercial customers.

Requirements

• 5+ years in product management, including ownership of a technically deep product sold to external customers. Must be able to operate in a product capacity within business models that are software and service oriented
• Strong domain grounding in materials science, catalysis, chemistry, or chemical engineering. Enough knowledge to sufficiently and credibly engage computational scientists, experimental validation partners, and domain SMEs.
• Track record shipping AI/ML-driven scientific or engineering software to external, paying or contracted users; and shipping products where the ICP was not clearly understood or demand generation and funnel was not already in place.
• Experience contributing to scope of offer, packaging and pricing decisions for technical software, or clear evidence of the commercial instinct to do so.
• Ability to engage both computational scientists and industrial, refining, chemical or equipment OEM partners, and to turn partner requirements into product requirements.
• Ability to reason commercially across multiple end markets at once, sizing opportunities, comparing them on evidence, and sequencing entry rather than pursuing all of them simultaneously.
• Comfort navigating deep ambiguity: translating unclear scientific and customer problems into structured roadmaps, success criteria, and measurable outcomes.
• Has an ownership mindset, and a rigorous operational execution track record.
• Bachelor's degree in Chemistry, Chemical Engineering or Materials Science or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience in one or more major catalysis end markets, refining and downstream, petrochemicals and commodity chemicals, emissions control, or energy-transition catalysis such as electrolysis, carbon utilization, e-fuels or chemical recycling.