Process Engineer, Chemical Scale-Up from Pilot to Production | First-to-Market Materials Build

A publicly traded specialty chemicals company is building new US manufacturing capacity for an advanced material headed into AI data center hardware, electric vehicles, and aerospace electronics. This seat sits in the global process engineering group that designs and scales it.

Pave Talent is hiring on behalf of our client, a global specialty chemicals manufacturer whose chemistry sits inside nearly every major electronics category. This role is based at their central New Jersey engineering center, the technical hub for process design and pilot-scale development, not a back-office lab.

• Engineers equally at home running an experiment in the lab and walking down a reactor skid on the plant floor
• Chemical engineers and chemists from heavy chemicals, oil and gas, pharmaceutical, or specialty chemical process development
• Builders who want to design the process, spec the equipment, and see it commissioned
• People energized by construction-phase travel, not drained by it

This is not a plant sustaining role, and it is not semiconductor fab process work (deposition, etch, lithography). The job is making the chemistry, not the chip.

You’ll join a small global process engineering group as the mid-level engineer who connects lab and pilot development to the production facilities. For the next two to three years the focus is scaling this material at new and expanding plants; after that, the role supports the company’s other product lines.

• Design, scale up, troubleshoot, and optimize chemical processes from lab and pilot plant through production
• Run process and equipment design calculations: mass and energy balances, heat transfer, fluid flow, mixing, equipment sizing
• Specify and prototype process equipment, including reactors, and support commissioning at new sites
• Design and execute design of experiments (DoE) studies to identify critical process parameters
• Build steady-state and dynamic simulations in Aspen Plus, ChemCAD, or DWSIM
• Analyze process performance with statistical process control (SPC) in Minitab, JMP, Python, or R
• Develop and maintain piping and instrumentation diagrams (P&IDs) and equipment matrices; 3D piping models and isometrics (experience or willingness to learn)
• Lead data-driven root cause analysis and transfer new processes with R&D, Operations, and Quality

Travel comes in waves. During construction phases expect up to about 50%, typically a stretch based in New Jersey followed by site trips every two to three weeks. Between builds it is much quieter. As the hiring manager put it: "We're not making semiconductors, we're making materials, we're making chemistries."

• Bachelor’s in Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, or a related discipline
• 5+ years in chemical process development, scale-up, or manufacturing (3+ with a Master’s)
• Demonstrated reaction chemistry and complex process troubleshooting
• Hands‑on experience in both lab or pilot settings and production plants
• Authorized to work in the US without current or future visa sponsorship
• Able to travel up to about 50% during construction phases
• Batch chemical processing experience