Director, Technology Development
Biosphere · Oakland · $200,000–$250,000 (stated in the posting)
About the Role
Biosphere has a technically ambitious roadmap with concrete milestones: new reactor technologies to de-risk and integrate into our demonstration plant. Your first job is to help us execute on these scoped challenges. You’ll own day-to-day R&D priorities, experimental decisions and delivery within agreed budgets. As you deliver, you’ll take increasing ownership of our highest-risk, highest-reward technical work, guided by our commercial priorities and commitments.
This is a management role. You’ll lead our small, multidisciplinary R&D team: setting priorities, coaching, reviewing data, and hiring as the work requires. You’ll bring a passion for rigorous experimental design, and prioritize projects backed by sound technoeconomic analysis. Everyone builds at a company our size, so expect to be hands-on too. This role will collaborate closely with our Principal Engineer and capital projects team. You’ll lead development and validation of the technologies assigned to your team, and together you’ll agree on requirements, acceptance criteria and the handoff into plant design and commissioning.
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 escalate changes to contractual commitments.
What success looks like
- In your first 60 days, agree on a delivery plan for the R&D portfolio with the Biosphere management team: priorities, owners, milestone dates, acceptance criteria and dependencies with the plant team.
- The first technologies on our roadmap have validated designs, test data and acceptance criteria, and are built into the demonstration plant’s design.
- The funded research projects you lead meet their milestones and budgets without delaying our priority commitments.
- You and the team make routine R&D decisions. Decisions about strategy, major spending or new commitments reach leadership with data, economics and a recommendation.
- You run the development portfolio independently and bring evidence-backed recommendations for what we tackle next.
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.
Preferred skills
- Bioreactor or fermentation equipment development, pilot-scale reactor design and scale-up
- Cleaning and sterilization (CIP, SIP, sterility validation) and hygienic design (ASME BPE, EHEDG)
- First-of-a-kind process plants or capital projects
- Government-funded R&D programs
- Instrumentation and controls
Benefits
At Biosphere, our goal is to empower talented individuals who are driven by the desire to work on tackling society's biggest challenges. To that end, we take pride in striving to be an equal opportunity employer with a healthy work culture, creating an environment where high performers can thrive. We currently offer the following benefits:
- Competitive compensation through a mix of salary and equity.
- Unlimited paid vacation and sick/leave days + public holidays.
- Comprehensive health insurance for employees and their dependents, including dental and vision.
- Paid family leave.
- Membership at Pacific Pipe Climbing gym next door.
Salary range: $200,000-$250,000 per year.
Biosphere is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.