Director of Research & Development

Reports to: Chief Technology Officer

Close collaboration with: Process Modeling, Product Engineering teams

Location: Kenilworth, NJ

Salary starts at: $217,00

Equity grant reflecting the seniority and trust of the role

Competitive Benefits

Still Bright is bringing the first viable hydrometallurgical alternative to copper smelting to market at a moment when global copper demand is outpacing supply by historic margins. Our proprietary RACER (Rapid and Complete Electrochemical Reduction) process delivers fast, complete copper extraction while recovering precious and critical co-products, and as a closed-loop system it offers precise control over outputs and radically reduces environmental impact.

Backed by top-tier investors including Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Material Impact, the team is moving from pilot execution into the next stages of commercial deployment.

The Director of Research & Development is accountable for building and leading Still Bright’s research function and delivering the experimental, technical, and team outcomes required to de-risk the RACER process chemistry and its integration with downstream recovery as the company moves from pilot through demonstration and into commercial deployment. This role owns the applied and exploratory research pipeline: the experimental programs that advance copper extraction, qualify new and complex feed stocks, map the deportment of elements through the system, and establish the compatibility of RACER with solvent extraction, electrowinning, and downstream flotation for co-product recovery.

Understanding how every element deports through the RACER system, and qualifying the company’s pipeline of new and complex feed stocks against it, is owned by this role. As Still Bright moves from a small set of proven feed stocks toward the wide range of ores, concentrates, and tailings the commercial business will process, the Director owns the science that determines what RACER can take, what it recovers, and where deleterious elements go.

Given the size of the team, this is a hands-on technical leadership role: the person in this seat is in the lab regularly, not exclusively in supervisory mode. The Director sets the technical standard for experimental rigor, data quality, and process-design discipline, and mentors scientists, engineers, and technicians on the team.

Working in close alignment with the Chief Technology Officer, the Director independently drives execution against the research priorities the Chief Technology Officer sets, leads and develops a high-performing team of scientists, engineers, and senior technicians, manages consultants and external partners, mitigates technical and operational risks, and ensures environmental and ethical responsibility. The role translates those priorities into experimental designs and resourcing plans, guides experimental and commissioning work, and makes data-driven decisions about how that work is executed to determine pilot readiness.

• Own the company’s understanding of elemental deportment across the RACER system: how copper, precious metals, co-products, and deleterious elements (arsenic, bismuth, antimony, and others) partition across leaching, reduction, solvent extraction, electrowinning, and downstream flotation, and how that partitioning shifts with each feedstock.

• Own qualification of new and complex feed stocks: direct the characterization and testwork (XRD, SEM, XRF, QEMSCAN, ICP-MS, Fire Assay) that determines whether a given concentrate, ore, or tailings stream is compatible with RACER, and define the operating adjustments required to process it.

• Build and maintain the deportment and recovery models that translate feedstock variability into defensible performance expectations, and keep them current as the company’s feedstock pipeline grows.

• Lead day-to-day execution of the research and process-development program, including experimental design, scheduling, data collection, and analysis.

• Translate the Chief Technology Officer’s research priorities into experimental programs: design the experiments and define the resources, equipment, personnel, and timelines required to…