CTO

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CTO

Full Time Frederick, MD, US

Overview

The CTO owns InventWood's manufacturing technology strategy from SUPERMILL TWO onward. This is a rare role at the intersection of deep process engineering, capital-intensive industrial scale-up, and platform design — because the objective is not to build one more mill, but to architect a replicable, modular manufacturing system that gets better, cheaper, and faster with every iteration.

Description

The Opportunity

InventWood has successfully commercialized SUPERWOOD with the strength of steel and the soul and beauty of wood. It is a new category of aesthetic and structural material which can transform the built environment and lead to better lives for humans and the environment.

With SUPERMILL ONE we successfully achieved commercial production at an industrial scale, and with SUPERMILL TWO we are bringing it to large scale. Next will be taking it into a global fleet of manufacturing plants, producing at a scale that can have impact across the planet. We’re looking for a Chief Technology Officer to lead that journey.

The Role

The CTO owns InventWood's manufacturing technology strategy from SUPERMILL TWO onward. This is a rare role at the intersection of deep process engineering, capital-intensive industrial scale-up, and platform design — because the objective is not to build one more mill, but to architect a replicable, modular manufacturing system that gets better, cheaper, and faster with every iteration.

You will translate continuing R&D innovation into manufacturable reality. You will design the next generations of SUPERMILLS so each plant costs less, ramps faster, and produces a wider range of products than the last. And you will build the technical organization — process and equipment engineers, automation and controls specialists, data and AI teams — that makes a fleet of mills possible.

You will report to the CEO and partner closely with the CSO, who owns the science and R&D, and with the operations leaders who run production day to day. Your success will be measured in dollars per pound, tons per year, time-to-first-output on each new mill, and the breadth of products SUPERWOOD can credibly address.

Key Responsibilities

Manufacturing technology strategy and roadmap

• Define and own the multi-year technology roadmap carrying SUPERMILL TWO through the next generations of facilities, with explicit targets for unit cost, throughput, capital intensity, and build timeline.
• Translate the ambition of world-transforming scale into a concrete sequence of technology bets — process intensification, equipment standardization, automation, digitalization, feedstock strategy — with clear milestones and capital requirements.
• Architect SUPERMILLS as a platform, not a series of bespoke plants: standardized unit operations, modular production cells, and reusable mechanical, electrical, and digital designs that compress time and capital for every subsequent build.
• Drive a learning curve that is captured in the design of each mill — so that SUPERMILL FOUR is meaningfully cheaper and faster to stand up than SUPERMILL THREE, and the delta grows with every iteration.
• Lead the internal engineering discipline, and work with external EPC partners, equipment vendors, and fabricators to deliver replicable facility designs at pace.

Lab-to-line translation

• Own the pipeline that carries innovation from the R&D bench to production lines — new formulations, process windows, product families, performance improvements — with the process engineering rigor that preserves what the science promises.
• Build a techno-economic lens into R&D decisions early, so the most promising innovations are also the ones that scale economically.
• Partner with the CSO to define the boundary between exploration and industrialization, and to staff both sides with excellence.

Cost, performance, and flexibility

• Drive down unit cost of production through process optimization, yield, automation, equipment standardization, and chemistry and feedstock improvements.
• Expand the performance envelope of SUPERWOOD — new grades, dimensions, form factors, integrated assemblies such as trusses, beams, and panels — that open new markets.
• Build manufacturing flexibility so that mills can produce for the highest-value application at any given time, and so that product lines can evolve without rebuilding plants.

Digitalization, data, and AI

• Design SUPERMILLS from day one as data-native operations, with instrumented equipment, clean data pipelines, and digital twins that enable simulation, optimization, and remote oversight of a fleet.
• Deploy AI where it moves the needle: parametric plant design, process control, defect detection, predictive maintenance, material property prediction, experimental design, and fleet-wide learning.
• Turn every mill into an instrument that makes the next one better.

Experimentation and engineering excellence

• Partner with the CSO to establish a rigorous Design of Experiments framework and high-throughput experimentation capability that generates world-class manufacturing data.
• Set and enforce the engineering standards — process, equipment, controls, software — that a fleet-scale company depends on.
• Champion hands-on prototyping and rapid iteration alongside disciplined scale-up.

Organization, team, and culture

• Build and lead the technical organization across process engineering, equipment engineering, automation and controls, digital and data, and pilot operations.
• Attract a caliber of engineering talent rarely available to early industrial companies, by articulating why this is one of the most consequential manufacturing opportunities of our time.
• Partner fluently with operations, commercial, R&D, and finance leadership to make decisions at the speed the opportunity demands.

What Success Looks Like in Three Years

• SUPERMILL TWO is running at or above its design nameplate with well-understood, defensible economics.
• SUPERMILL THREE — and the modular platform behind it — is designed, financed, and under construction, with a materially lower per-ton capital cost and a credible path to further reductions.
• A product roadmap exists that expands SUPERWOOD into multiple large end markets, each with a defined manufacturing pathway.
• InventWood's manufacturing technology organization is recognized as one of the best industrial scale-up teams in the world.

Who You Are

• You have scaled a physical, capital-intensive manufacturing technology from first commercial plant to multi-plant operation — in advanced materials, chemicals, batteries, semiconductors, or an adjacent industry. You know what it feels like to make the leap from “it works” to “it scales.”
• You have designed and built manufacturing equipment and facilities, not just specified them.
• You’re adaptable and confident working across environments—from hands-on time on the plant floor to engaging in strategic discussions with leadership.
• You know your way around a shop. You have welded, machined, assembled, and prototyped hardware with your own hands, and you bring that fluency into every design review and vendor conversation.
• You have led the translation of R&D into production at real scale, and can point to the products and plants that would not exist without your technical leadership.
• You think in systems and platforms, but you are rooted in first principles. You have an instinct for when to standardize, when to customize, and how to encode learning into design so the next build is better than the last.
• You have attacked both cost and reliability, demonstrated high caliber technical organizational leadership, and demonstrated engineering excellence that motivates all those around you.
• You are fluent in modern manufacturing digitalization — MES, SCADA, data infrastructure, digital twins, ML-driven process control — and you know what these technologies can actually deliver versus what they promise.
• You partner effectively with CEOs, boards, investors, and customers, and can represent the technical realities of a company that is simultaneously industrial, technological, and mission-driven.
• You are drawn to problems where the technical challenge and the world-positive outcome are inseparable.
• Advanced degree in engineering, materials science, chemical engineering, or a related discipline. PhD welcome but not required where experience is commensurate.
• 15+ years of progressively senior technology and manufacturing leadership, including ownership of at least one large industrial scale-up.
• Demonstrated experience leading technology strategy at the executive level, not only running operations.

Why InventWood

SUPERWOOD unites the strength of steel with the soul and beauty of wood. It is a material that can transform the built environment at a scale measured in billions of tons — and that can make the spaces people live, work, and gather in better for both humans and the planet.

The companies that define how this material gets made at global scale — the equipment, the processes, the platforms, the economics — will shape the material foundation of the 21st century.

At a time when artificial intelligence accelerates the pace of technological change in the digital world, the bottlenecks to human thriving will be felt ever more in physical infrastructure. The CTO will bring those tools together to unlock InventWood’s innovations, enabling humanity to build faster, cheaper, and bring nature more into the lives of everyone on the planet.