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

Position Summary

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 feedstocks, 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 feedstocks against it, is owned by this role. As Still Bright moves from a small set of proven feedstocks 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.

Key Responsibilities

• 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 feedstocks: 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 execute them across RACER chemistry, feedstock diversification, co-product recovery, and downstream integration.

• Manage a team of research scientists, engineers, and senior technicians, with direct responsibility for performance management, professional development, and technical mentorship.

• Direct the research establishing RACER’s compatibility with solvent extraction, electrowinning, and downstream flotation, and the recovery of copper and saleable by-products.

• Predict metallurgical and chemical challenges and opportunities for different feedstock opportunities, as well as upstream and downstream mining processes.

• Own bench-level execution of site-specific feedstock testing: ore characterization protocols, recovery curve generation, deleterious-element handling experiments, and the data work that feeds the company’s economic models.

• Act as a resident expert for the business and technical teams on all things copper processing, helping integrate RACER seamlessly with mining operations and typical processing considerations.

• Own quality control of experimental data and technical documentation—data integrity, calibration discipline, reproducibility of experimental conditions, and clean record-keeping that supports decision-making and future audit defensibility.

• Uphold excellence in experimentation plans, laboratory procedures and safety, and research records. Working mostly in-person is required to ensure proper oversight of laboratory work.

Definition of Success

In the first 12 months, success looks like: a research function staffed and reliably delivering high-quality experimental work against the Chief Technology Officer’s research priorities, on schedule; a defensible, data-backed model of elemental deportment through the system across the company’s priority feedstocks; a working framework for qualifying new and complex feedstocks against RACER; a validated understanding of RACER’s compatibility with solvent extraction, electrowinning, and downstream flotation feeding the company’s scale-up decisions and economic models; and clean documentation and process know-how transferred to the demonstration program as the first demonstration unit moves into field deployment.

Qualifications & Experience

Expected Competencies

• Doctorate in chemical engineering, metallurgical engineering, electrochemistry, or a related field strongly preferred; a Master’s with commensurate experience will be considered.

• Minimum of 10 years of industrial or research experience, including 1–2 years at the Director level or 3–4 years at the manager level, in hydrometallurgy, electrochemistry, or process engineering within the mining or metallurgy industry.

• Deep understanding of elemental deportment and mass-balance accounting of trace, co-product, and deleterious elements across complex feedstocks.

• Direct people management experience leading a team of scientists, engineers, or senior technicians on technical execution work.

• Excellent understanding of copper mineralogy and processing, especially hydrometallurgical methods and emerging technologies.

• Demonstrated hands-on contributor capability: comfortable being in the lab and on the pilot system regularly.

• Strong experimental design, data analysis, and project-management discipline—schedules, milestones, resource allocation, and clear progress reporting.

• Comfort in a startup or scale-up environment where infrastructure and processes are still being built. Some travel will be required for pilot and feedstock testing.

Strongly Preferred Experience

• Demonstrated expertise in solid, liquid, and gaseous phase characterization techniques (XRD, SEM, XRF, QEMSCAN, ICP-MS, Fire Assay).

• Direct experience with pilot-plant or demonstration-scale metallurgical systems, including commissioning, operation, and troubleshooting.

• Proven track record translating bench-scale results into pilot-scale performance, and integrating multiple unit operations into a continuous or semi-continuous process.

• Additional consideration for experience managing copper ore impurities such as arsenic, bismuth, and gold.

• Experience with one or more of: vanadium electrochemistry, sulfide leaching chemistry, solvent extraction–electrowinning, continuous stirred tank reactor design and operation.

• Familiarity with process controls, instrumentation, and real-time performance monitoring.

• Internal promotion candidates: existing context on the RACER process, team relationships, and demonstrated execution capability.

Nice-to-Have

• Leadership of a pilot campaign through sustained operation or scale-up decision milestones.

• Contribution to demo-plant design, studies, or commercial deployment readiness.

• Familiarity with quality management systems (ISO 9001 or equivalent) and document control discipline.

• Spanish-language proficiency.

Boundary with the Chief Technology Officer

The Chief Technology Officer owns the technology and the science: the RACER process chemistry and flowsheet, intellectual property strategy and patent prosecution, the next-generation research pipeline, the scientific advisory board, and external engagement with investors and academic collaborators. The Chief Technology Officer sets the research priorities, working from the gap between where the product is today and where it needs to be in both the short and long term, and delegates those priorities to the Director of Research & Development.

The Director of Research & Development owns the design and delivery of the research that meets those priorities: translating each delegated objective into a design of experiments, defining the resources, equipment, personnel, and timelines required, leading the research scientists and technicians, ensuring data integrity and reproducibility, and translating laboratory results into the elemental-deportment, feedstock-qualification, and recovery understanding that informs scale-up. The operating rule that makes the split work: the Chief Technology Officer sets and owns the research priorities; the Director of Research & Development determines how to accomplish them and executes. The Director may surface technical input, risks, and trade-offs, but executes the research agenda as prioritized by the Chief Technology Officer; setting, re-ordering, or paring down those priorities is the Chief Technology Officer’s responsibility, not the Director’s. Given the size of the team, the Director is expected to remain hands-on, contributing directly in the lab as well as leading.

This job description is not intended to be a comprehensive list of the duties and responsibilities of the position. Still Bright provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability or genetics. In addition to federal law requirements, Still Bright complies with applicable state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment in every location in which the company has facilities. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.

Still Bright expressly prohibits and will never tolerate any form of workplace harassment based on race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status. Still Bright especially encourages applicants from historically marginalized communities to join our mission of sustainable metals extraction.