Acre has been retained to find an Analytical Chemist/Scientist that will be responsible for analytical methods development and laboratory experimentation, ultimately playing an essential role process development and scale-up.
Aviation runs on fossil kerosene. Heavy transport runs on diesel. Decarbonizing both depends on chemistry that works at scale, at cost, and with data that holds up. Our client has spent decades building the process to replace fossil hydrocarbons with renewable ones.
The Role
Reporting into the Denver R&D Center, you’d move between fermentation and chemical technology teams as a cross-functional process chemistry resource. This is not a support function – you’d own your experiments, your methods, and the quality of data that drives decisions at the program level.
You’d sit outside the traditional team hierarchy by design. Both the fermentation and chemical technology teams rely on you to develop analytical infrastructure that neither team has time to build on its own. You’d lead sub-projects and make sure the data feeding financial models and pilot plant decisions is rigorous enough to hold up.
This is an individual contributor role with a direct line to project leadership and, for the right person, group management.
What You'll Build
- Analytical methods from scratch: gas chromatography (GC), liquid chromatography (HPLC), and ion-exchange chromatography (IC) coverage for process streams across fermentation, distillation, extraction, and catalytic processes
- Experimental campaigns that answer whether a process or technology is worth scaling
- Data infrastructure that feeds directly into technoeconomic and financial models
- Method transfer protocols for pilot plant interface and scale-up validation
- New methodologies on brand-new instrumentation, in a lab environment being rebuilt from the ground up
You Will Be Successful Here If
- You have scaled something from the lab bench to pilot and beyond. You can describe what you owned at each stage, what changed, and what you learned. That trajectory is clear on your CV, and you can articulate it in a conversation.
- You design experiments with the model in mind. You understand why data quality at the bench determines whether a financial projection is defensible.
- You treat method development as a discipline, not a task. You have built methods from scratch for multi-component streams and can explain the decisions you made and why.
What We Need
- BS Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, or Biology (MS or PhD preferred) with 5-8 years’ experience within a corporate R&D environment
- Analytical chemistry lab experience in a corporate or industry setting: fermentation, chemical catalysis, or bioprocess development. Experience in the biofuels, chemicals, and/or petroleum industries is required.
- Operating-level proficiency in gas chromatography (GC), liquid chromatography (HPLC), and ion-exchange chromatography (IC). You run it, troubleshoot it, and develop new methods for it.
- Demonstrated analytical method development from scratch for multi-component process streams.
- Pilot plant or production facility interface: method transfer, scale-up data generation, or process stream validation at non-bench scale.
- Citizenship or permanent residency status in the United States.
Replacing fossil fuels at the scale the world needs is an industrial chemistry problem. It is solved in the lab, one validated method and one rigorous data set at a time. What you build here directly determines whether the next phase of scale-up is fundable, so if you’re motivated by the size of impact that your work will have, this one is for you. Apply now with a copy of your resume!
