Scientific Chief of Staff

About Phoenix Tailings

Phoenix Tailings is a U.S.

-based rare earth metals company building the most technologically advanced rare earth manufacturing platform in the world. The company develops and deploys breakthrough technologies across chemistry, industrial hardware, and digital infrastructure to produce rare earth metals and critical materials domestically at lower cost, higher efficiency, and greater scale.

We operate a fully integrated rare earth production platform spanning extraction, separation, refining, and metallization with a zero waste and zero emissions philosophy. The company is focused on restoring America's leadership in critical minerals and building the foundation for a secure domestic supply chain powering defense, energy, robotics, aerospace, and advanced manufacturing.

At Phoenix, we believe nothing great is ever accomplished alone - or without the passion of people who push and motivate one another. You’ll be joining a team building the foundational infrastructure for the modern world, developing entirely new ways to produce rare earth and critical metals domestically, cleanly, and at scale.

• You are only crazy if you are wrong, it’s ok to be wrong
• Lead with Compassion
• Be Resourceful
• Listen
• Hustle

Our Technology and R&D organization - chemistry, hydrometallurgy, separations, analytical science, and the broader technology function - is led by our CTO. We're hiring a Chief of Staff to be his right hand: owning project management across R&D and Technology, keeping the team aligned on priorities, and serving as the connective tissue between the science and the business. This is a dedicated role for the CTO's organization - distinct from our company-wide Chief of Staff function, which supports the CEO.

This is a technical program management and organizational role, not a bench-science role. You'll need enough fluency in the chemistry to know how the pieces fit together - where a delay in one workstream blocks another, and where a business priority should change what R&D works on next.

• Serve as the CTO's day-to-day right hand - managing his priorities, prepping for cross-functional and executive conversations, and closing the loop on commitments after they’re made
• Own project management and operating cadence across R&D and Technology: standups, roadmap reviews, milestone tracking, and the discipline that keeps commitments visible and on track
• Track dependencies across Deep R&D (chemistry, hydrometallurgy, separations, analytical) and the broader Technology function - you need to understand how the technical pieces come together well enough to know when one workstream’s delay is another’s blocker
• Translate in both directions: turn business, commercial, and operations priorities into a technical roadmap the team can execute against, and translate technical progress into language the rest of the business and executive team can act on
• Partner with the VP of Technology and other technical leads to surface risk early, resolve ambiguous ownership, and keep decisions from stalling
• Prepare materials and talking points for board, executive, and investor updates on technical progress
• Build the process the org doesn’t have yet — meeting hygiene, documentation, decision tracking, escalation paths — without adding bureaucracy to a fast-moving lab environment

• 5–8 years in technical program management, R&D operations, or a chief-of-staff-style role supporting a technical or scientific executive/organization
• Experience in materials science, chemistry, battery, mining, or hardware/deep-tech environments strongly preferred
• Track record of building the operating rhythm for complex, multi-workstream technical programs — not just tracking a spreadsheet, but creating the cadence and follow-through that didn’t exist before
• Enough technical/scientific fluency to follow how a chemistry-heavy R&D organization’s work streams connect and depend on each other
• Skilled at translating between scientific/technical teams and commercial or executive stakeholders
• High trust, low ego, discreet — you’ll see the full picture of technical strategy before most of the…