Technology Development Lead

Nanos Tech is a Calgary-based catalyst and process technology company built on more than two decades of research originating at the University of Calgary. We engineer nanocatalysts that deliver noble-metal performance at base-metal cost, scalable with standard manufacturing and stable in harsh, water-rich environments.

We operate three technology platforms, all powered by the same underlying catalyst design philosophy:

• AQP classic and Bio (Aquaprocessing) — a modular refining suite self-sufficient in hydrogen that processes fossil and renewable oils in water-rich environments, producing refinery-ready feedstock and fuels.
• ISUT® (In-Situ Upgrading Technology) — a reservoir-integrated process for heavy-oil operators that combines mobility improvement, in-reservoir catalytic upgrading, and thermal-efficiency gains.
• Carbon Management — built around our Olympia catalyst (published in Science) for CO₂-to-syngas conversion via the reverse water-gas shift reaction.

We work from a 10,000 sq. ft. facility in Calgary, with a team of 25+ scientists, engineers, and industry veterans, an in-house catalyst manufacturing capability, demonstration-scale systems, and a portfolio of 66+ patents.

We are hiring a Technology Development Lead to drive the technical development of our AQP (Aquaprocessing) renewable-fuels platform, which converts pyrolysis oils, HTL bio-oils, and related water-rich feed stocks into refinery-ready, low-carbon fuels, with opportunities to support adjacent programs (e.g., Carbon Management / RWGS and related reforming chemistries) as the portfolio evolves.

This is a senior technical leadership role for a strong individual contributor with hands-on technology development experience who will serve as the technical owner of the AQP platform. The role is focused on advancing the technology itself: defining technical priorities, directing experimental programs, interpreting results, identifying technical risks and knowledge gaps, and determining the most effective path forward to reduce uncertainty and support scale-up.

You will work closely with company leadership and with scientists, engineers, technicians, catalyst specialists, process engineers, and characterization personnel to ensure development activities are technically rigorous, focused on the highest-value questions, and aligned with overall company priorities.

We are looking for real depth, not a generalist project manager. The strongest candidates will have most of these following:

• PhD or MSc in chemical engineering, or a closely related discipline
  , with a research focus in heterogeneous catalysis, hydroprocessing, reforming, or related reacting systems.
• 10+ years of hands-on experience moving a technology from pilot through demonstration
  , with at least part of that time spent helping advance a technology from pilot scale toward demonstration or commercial deployment. Experience at an established technology developer, licensor, refinery, chemical producer, or industrial R&D organization is strongly preferred.
  
  - including operating or supervising bench and pilot units, planning campaigns, interpreting non-ideal experimental data, and converting that data into design decisions.
• Demonstrable expertise in the kinetic study of complex reacting systems — multi-reaction, multi-phase, often water- or steam-mediated, with deactivation, mass-transfer, and feedstock-variability effects. You should be able to point to specific reacting systems you have characterized: how you designed the campaign, how you discriminated between candidate mechanisms, how you handled parameter estimation and identifiability, how you validated the model, and how it held up, or failed, at larger scale.
• Strong reactor modeling skills and fluency with the coupling of kinetics with transport phenomena in fixed-bed, slurry, or related contexts. Working fluency with at least one of: gPROMS, Aspen/Aspen Custom Modeler, MATLAB, Python.
• Practical command of preliminary process design
  : PFDs, mass and energy balances, equipment sizing, operating envelopes, process integration, and the technical inputs required to support scale-up and techno-economic…