SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: USD 100,000 - 125,000 / annual
Alta Resource Technologies is a next-generation mining company founded in 2023 that uses synthetic biology to separate critical minerals from conventional, unconventional, and e-waste sources. The company is expanding its R&D team in Boulder, Colorado to address the historic surge in mineral demand driven by new tech and information technology industries.
You will join a small R&D team developing the resins and sorbents central to Alta's separation process. This is a bench-heavy role (approximately 70% hands-on laboratory work) focused on establishing in-house resin synthesis and functionalization capabilities, developing analytical methods to characterize resin properties, and driving iterative improvements in adsorbent materials.
Key responsibilities include:
**Resin Synthesis & Functionalization:** Develop and implement in-house methods for porous resin synthesis, surface functionalization, and ligand attachment to produce adsorbents with defined chemical and physical properties.
**Resin Characterization:** Develop and qualify analytical methods for resin composition, functional group density, ligand loading, porosity, and particle properties, with the judgment to recognize when measurements are unreliable or outside valid ranges.
**Performance Evaluation:** Connect material properties to process outcomes—protein immobilization, adsorption capacity, selectivity, stability, and separation performance—working alongside protein chemistry and process engineering teams.
**Process Development:** Establish reproducible synthesis and functionalization workflows at the bench, optimize reaction conditions, and identify critical process parameters governing resin quality.
**Tech Transfer:** Translate workflows into process specifications for larger-scale production and support integration into Alta's adsorbent manufacturing workflows.
**Documentation & Communication:** Maintain rigorous experimental records, author SOPs and test methods, analyze and interpret data, and communicate results, risks, and recommendations clearly to cross-functional teams, executives, and external stakeholders.
**Requirements:**
- M.S. or Ph.D. in chemistry, chemical engineering, materials science, polymer science, or closely related field with hands-on laboratory experience:
- Scientist I: M.S. plus 3–5 years, or Ph.D. plus 0–2 years, with a record of strong technical expertise and independent research contributions.
- Scientist II: M.S. plus 5+ years, or Ph.D. plus 2–5 years, with proven ability to lead projects, method development, and data analysis.
- Hands-on experience making or modifying materials (polymers, porous solids, inorganic/hybrid materials, surfaces, coatings, catalysts, membranes, functionalized particles) and relating synthesis to resulting properties.
- Experience characterizing materials with complementary techniques (spectroscopy, thermal analysis, microscopy, surface/porosity analysis, titration, elemental analysis, chromatography) with judgment to recognize unreliable measurements.
- Solid practical wet chemistry skills: running reactions, handling reagents safely, and converting chemical outcomes into quantitative data via assays, titration, gravimetry, or instrumental analysis.
- Demonstrated ability to run structured experimental campaigns: isolating variables, designing around confounds, and drawing defensible conclusions from noisy data.
- Rigorous documentation habits including detailed lab notebook/ELN records and reproducible written procedures.
- Comfort working with limited supervision amid shifting priorities in a fast-paced R&D environment.
**Preferred Qualifications:**
- Direct experience making cross-linked porous beads via suspension, emulsion, or dispersion polymerization (styrene–divinylbenzene, methacrylate/acrylate systems, polyHIPE, or Ugelstad routes).
- Protein, peptide, or enzyme immobilization on solid supports with measurement of loading, retained activity, and leaching.
- Post-polymerization modification (chloromethylation, epoxide ring-opening, amination, activation chemistries).
- Working command of at least two porosity/particle characterization techniques (N₂/Ar physisorption, mercury intrusion porosimetry, inverse size-exclusion chromatography, SEM, laser diffraction).
- Packed-bed column evaluation: breakthrough curves, dynamic binding capacity, pressure drop, multi-cycle studies.
- Materials lifetime and degradation testing under aggressive conditions over repeated cycles.
- Design of experiments and statistical analysis.
- Prior experience at a resin, chromatography media, or sorbent manufacturer.
The company welcomes strong applicants from bioseparations/protein chromatography, polymer and colloid chemistry, sorbent and separations engineering, or synthetic/surface/bioconjugation chemistry backgrounds.
