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Redwood Materials, founded in 2017 by JB Straubel (Tesla co-founder and former CTO), is North America's largest lithium-ion battery recycler. The company recovers, refines, and redeploys critical minerals from end-of-life batteries back into supply chains, and has deployed the world's largest second-life battery project powering AI data centers. Redwood is profitable and operates in a market projected to grow 20–50x over the next decade.
This role serves as Redwood's senior technical authority on extractive metallurgy across recycling and refining operations. You will own the metallurgical basis of design for how Redwood liberates, separates, and refines metals from recycled feedstocks—spanning mechanical separation of heterogeneous feeds, high-temperature processing, hydrometallurgical refining, and electrochemical upgrading of battery metals and critical minerals. You will exercise independent judgment on methods and evaluation criteria for first-of-a-kind processes where data is incomplete, and your recommendations will determine which flowsheets Redwood deploys at commercial scale.
Key responsibilities include:
- Serving as senior technical authority on extractive metallurgy, owning the metallurgical basis of design for recycling and refining flowsheets from feedstock through refined product
- Leading evaluation and selection of competing flowsheet options, translating bench and pilot data into defensible recommendations for commercial deployment
- Owning the metallurgical basis for intermediate and final product quality specifications, diagnosing impurity deportment across unit operations, and driving issues to root cause
- Directing strategy for mineral processing and mechanical separation of heterogeneous feedstocks, including comminution, liberation, classification, and physical concentration
- Guiding scale-up from bench through pilot to commercial operation, including mass and energy balances, equipment selection, and vendor test campaigns
- Partnering with Business Development to define process pathways and pricing for new feedstocks and to identify offtake markets and their value drivers
- Advising operations and process engineering teams on recovery, yield, and reliability shortfalls at commissioned plants, and raising metallurgical rigor across the engineering organization through technical review and mentorship
This is a strategic individual contributor role with regular interaction with Redwood's CTO and CEO. Success depends on driving innovation and plant deployment at an exceptional pace. The position requires travel to plant sites as needed.
**Requirements:**
- Bachelor's or advanced degree in Metallurgical Engineering, Extractive Metallurgy, Mining Engineering, Mineral Processing, Materials Science, Chemical Engineering, or related discipline
- 15+ years of experience in extractive metallurgy, mineral processing, or metals process engineering, or equivalent depth of expertise
- Demonstrated ownership of deploying a flowsheet from pilot scale through commercial operation, with accountability for the plant's technical performance
- Deep industrial-scale experience in pyrometallurgy or hydrometallurgy; experience across both preferred
- Hands-on experience in an operating plant environment such as a smelter, refinery, or concentrator
- Experience with comminution and physical separation of variable, heterogeneous feedstocks
