Description

WHAT WE NEED

We are seeking a metals processing specialist to expand the founding research and engineering team with experience in metallurgical and/or hydrometallurgical processes, motivated by the advancement of sustainable chemistry. This individual will collaborate closely with a multidisciplinary team to design, develop, and deploy innovative solutions for metal extraction, refining, and recovery from e-waste, scrap materials, and other primary or secondary feedstocks.

The successful candidate will play a key role in process development at Andean Systems, working within the founding team to translate laboratory concepts into validated technical solutions. Responsibilities will include developing and optimizing leaching strategies for novel metal feedstocks, defining experimental test parameters to evaluate new materials, and characterizing reaction performance to guide process scale-up and implementation.

WHAT YOU WILL DO

Responsibilities

• Develop and execute multi-stage leaching procedures to recover target metals against defined performance metrics.
• Qualify and optimize processes through analytical and materials characterization.
• Collaborate on pre-processing and scale-up methods to improve process performance.
• Communicate technical results, challenges, and recommendations across the organization.
• Characterize feedstocks, chemical reactions, and process products.

Requirements

Qualifications

• BS, MS, or PhD in a relevant field (e.g., materials science, metallurgy, chemistry, or chemical engineering), with a preference for 3+ years of hands-on experience in a wet chemistry laboratory or industrial setting.
• Experience with aqueous and solid metal analysis techniques such as AA, ICP-MS, ICP-OES, UV-Vis, XRD, XRF, XPS, and SEM-EDS.
• Demonstrated ability to monitor chemical reaction progress and kinetics.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced, startup environment.
• Ability to lift up to 50 pounds.

Highly Valued Experience

• Hands-on experience with hydrometallurgical processes, including leaching and precipitation.
• Experience designing experiments, executing test work, analyzing results, and writing or presenting technical findings.
• Experience designing multi-stage metallurgical processes (batch or continuous), including reactor or system design.
• Experience sampling, characterizing, and processing heterogeneous feedstocks.
• Experience with gold leaching and/or separation.