VP, Technology (Process Engineering)

Job Description

Job Description

We have been exclusively retained by a venture-backed industrial technology company that is redefining how steel is made, to identify a Vice President, Technology & Engineering for the company's next stage of growth.

The organization has developed a first-of-its-kind, single-step metalmaking process designed to dramatically reduce emissions and production costs while improving scalability and product quality. Having successfully demonstrated the technology at pilot scale, the company is now moving from proof-of-concept toward larger-scale commercial deployment.

This is a highly visible, hands-on senior technical leadership role focused on steelmaking technology, engineering integration, process scale-up, and plant-facing execution. The person in this seat will help lead the connection point between R&D, engineering, plant engineering, and operations as the company scales its technology from pilot operations toward commercial production.

This is not a pure R&D role, nor a traditional plant operations role. It is a technical and engineering leadership position for someone who can understand the science, lead highly technical people, evaluate competing technical viewpoints, and keep the broader organization aligned around the right technical path forward.

This is a direct-hire leadership role based at the company's headquarters and operating facilities in the greater Houston area.

The Role You'll Play

The Vice President, Technology & Engineering will be responsible for leading technology and engineering integration across the company's steelmaking process, with a focus on scale-up, process development, plant engineering, and commercialization readiness.

This person will report directly to the CEO/Founder and work closely with other executive leadership and technical teams to ensure that the process, equipment, engineering design, and plant systems advance together in a practical, scalable way. The right candidate does not need to personally design every subsystem, but must be technically strong enough to evaluate designs, understand tradeoffs, challenge assumptions, identify gaps, and lead highly capable SMEs toward sound decisions.

This role is intended to be a critical senior technical leadership seat with the potential to grow into a future CTO role as the company scales.

Key responsibilities include:

• Lead technology and engineering integration across the company's steelmaking process, ensuring that process development, plant engineering, and scale-up activities remain aligned.

• Provide senior technical leadership across highly technical engineering, metallurgy, process development, and plant engineering teams.

• Help ensure that each major component of the steelmaking system is designed with metallurgical quality, furnace performance, energy demand, operability, and scale-up requirements in mind.

• Oversee and guide technical workstreams related to process optimization, furnace behavior, heat transfer, melting processes, off-gas handling, energy recovery, and related plant systems.

• Evaluate technical designs, simulations, engineering analyses, and scale-up assumptions to identify risks, gaps, and practical paths forward.

• Lead cross-functional alignment between R&D, engineering, plant engineering, and operations, ensuring technical decisions translate into safe, reliable, and scalable plant performance.

• Serve as a senior technical decision-maker when competing technical viewpoints arise, helping the team move forward without defaulting to executive leadership for every disagreement.

• Think holistically across the plant, including furnace optimization, metallurgical quality, energy balance, off-gas handling, process stability, and commercial-scale operability.

• Support the transition from pilot-scale operations toward larger-scale commercial systems, including technology development, engineering readiness, and scale-up planning.

• Partner with operations leadership while maintaining clear focus on technology, engineering, and process scale-up rather than day-to-day plant operations.

• Spend meaningful time in plant and technical environments to stay close to the process, equipment, data, and people responsible for making the technology work in the real world.

Background Profile

The ideal candidate is a senior technical and engineering leader with strong steelmaking or closely related high-temperature industrial process experience. This person brings enough technical depth to understand the fundamentals, enough leadership maturity to manage highly capable technical people, and enough systems thinking to see how each technical decision affects the broader plant and scale-up roadmap.

This is a strong fit for someone who can operate above individual technical silos while still staying close enough to the details to make informed decisions. The company is not looking for a pure researcher, a pure operator, or a narrow engineering execution leader. They need someone who can bridge technology, engineering, plant design, and process scale-up.

• 10+ years of experience in steelmaking, ironmaking, pyrometallurgy, high-temperature industrial processing, metals production, or a highly relevant adjacent industrial process environment.

• Strong understanding of steelmaking fundamentals, including metallurgy, heat transfer, melting processes, upstream engineering, and furnace-based systems.

• Proven ability to lead, align, and direct highly technical SMEs across engineering, metallurgy, process development, R&D, and plant engineering.

• Experience evaluating technical designs, process models, simulations, engineering analyses, or scale-up assumptions and translating them into practical decisions.

• Experience with process scale-up, pilot-to-commercial transition, plant design, technology development, commissioning, startup, or high-temperature system integration.

• Ability to think holistically across a plant or process system, including how furnace behavior, energy demand, off-gas handling, process quality, and operability interact.

• Strong technical judgment and the ability to resolve competing technical viewpoints without relying on constant escalation.

• Comfort working in plant, pilot, or industrial environments, with enough operational exposure to understand how technology behaves outside of a design document.

• Experience working cross-functionally with R&D, engineering, plant engineering, operations, safety, and leadership teams.

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Metallurgical Engineering, Materials Science, Chemical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, or a related technical discipline.

Preferred or highly valued experience includes :

• Direct experience in steelmaking, ironmaking, EAF, blast furnace, DRI, HBI, or upstream steel production environments.

• Experience with pyrometallurgy, furnace systems, melting processes, or high-temperature process technology.

• Experience with off-gas handling, energy recovery, plant energy balance, or related process systems.

• Prior experience in a startup, scale-up, or high-growth industrial technology company.

• Experience leading technical teams through ambiguity, competing priorities, and first-of-kind process challenges.

• Ability to identify where the team needs deeper SME support and help define the technical gaps required for successful scale-up.