Founding CTO – Critical Minerals Startup
We’re a highly driven founding team with backgrounds spanning energy innovation to national security —now building a company to transform how critical minerals are sourced and refined in the United States.
Our mission: to bring to market a clean, scalable, and lab-validated process that redefines the critical minerals supply chain. We’re working in collaboration with a renowned scientist to scale this breakthrough technology—and we’re looking for a Founding CTO to lead the engineering side of this effort.
You’ll join at a pivotal stage, shaping the technical roadmap, driving process scale-up, and building out a world-class engineering team. This is a unique opportunity to take a first-of-its-kind process from lab to pilot to commercial scale—and to own a significant stake in the company’s success.
What You’ll Do
- Design and scale a novel process from feedstock to product, ready for customer delivery.
- Lead the development of pilot and commercial-scale production facilities.
- Own process design, including P&IDs, engineering drawings, and specification sheets.
- Conduct safety and risk assessments (FMEA, HAZOP, etc.) to ensure robust, safe systems.
- Develop detailed capital and operating cost models.
- Recruit and lead a high-caliber technical team as the company grows.
What We’re Looking For
- 4+ years of industry experience in metallurgy, mineral processing, or structural materials.
- B.S. in Chemical Engineering, Materials Science, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field. M.S. preferred.
- Strong process design and scale-up experience.
- Builder’s mindset—comfortable with ambiguity and motivated to solve hard problems fast.
- Start-up or early-stage experience is a plus but not required.
Compensation
This is a founding team role with meaningful equity ownership. Salary to be determined based on experience and funding stage.
