Principal Product Manager, Material Science

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Take responsibility for the complete Catalysis product strategy, vision, and roadmap.

• Act as the product owner for catalysis within SandboxAQ's $500M CHIPS Act R&D grant.

• Convert contractual objectives into product requirements and ensure external fulfillment.

• Collaborate with Program Managers to guarantee successful milestone achievement.

• Establish the commercial foundation for catalysis as a product-driven business generating recurring revenue.

• Work alongside Application Scientists and Business Development to identify customer needs.

• Integrate field insights, application benchmarking data, and market feedback into customer personas and performance drivers.

• Transform customer insights into prioritized product requirements and specifications.

• Convert catalysis objectives into a vertical roadmap and create evidence packages for Fulfillment Notices to the U.S. Department of Commerce.

• Define dataset, model, chemical coverage, fidelity, and benchmarking requirements in collaboration with scientific and ML teams.

• Propel the roadmap from property and energetics prediction towards reaction-level modeling.

• Assess customer value, including yield, selectivity, catalyst longevity, energy efficiency, and emissions reductions.

• Provide Go-to-Market, Application Science, and Business Development teams with value propositions, value models, and commercialization strategies.

• Contribute to customer segmentation, offer scope, packaging, and pricing models.

• Develop and maintain strategic product-level partner relationships.

• Convert partner requirements into product features.

• Define and monitor product and commercial KPIs, including model accuracy, workflow adoption, segment expansion, and recurring revenue growth.

• Implement course corrections against OKRs.

• Formulate and justify build-vs-buy and build-vs-partner recommendations.

• Act as the primary product representative for catalysis to program stakeholders, ecosystem partners, and potential customers.

• Distinguish shared capabilities from market-specific roadmap components.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 5 years of experience in product management, including ownership of a technically complex product sold to external customers.

• Capability to operate in a product capacity within software- and service-oriented business models.

• Strong foundational knowledge in materials science, catalysis, chemistry, or chemical engineering.

• Ability to engage computational scientists, experimental validation partners, and domain SMEs with credibility.

• Proven track record of delivering AI/ML-driven scientific or engineering software to external, paying, or contracted users.

• Experience in launching products where the ideal customer profile was not well-defined or where demand generation and funnel were not established.

• Involvement in shaping the scope of offers, packaging, and pricing decisions for technical software, or a clear commercial instinct for doing so.

• Ability to engage computational scientists and partners in industrial, refining, chemical, or equipment OEM sectors.

• Skill in translating partner requirements into product specifications.

• Ability to think commercially across multiple end markets, size opportunities using evidence, and sequence market entry.

• Comfort in navigating significant ambiguity and transforming unclear scientific and customer challenges into structured roadmaps, success criteria, and measurable outcomes.

• Ownership mindset and a strong record of operational execution.

• Bachelor's degree in Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, or Materials Science, or equivalent practical experience.

• Experience in one or more major catalysis end markets (highly desired).

• Familiarity with computational chemistry workflows such as density functional theory (DFT), molecular dynamics, or microkinetic modeling (highly desired).

• Experience in semiconductor or electronic materials process chemistry (highly desired).

• Knowledge of homogeneous or solution-phase catalysis and heterogeneous surface chemistry (highly desired).

• Understanding of machine-learned interatomic potentials, spin polarization in transition-metal systems, and evaluation of ML models against experimental or first-principles reference data (highly desired).

• Proven experience in building product-led growth strategies for technical or scientific software (highly desired).

• Previous product or business development engagement with catalyst manufacturers, chemical producers, refiners, or semiconductor ecosystem partners (highly desired).

• Familiarity with multi-tenant SaaS, API governance, and enterprise security and compliance requirements (highly desired).

• Advanced degree in Computational Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, Catalysis, Materials Science, or a related field (highly desired).

• Must possess legal authorization to work in the country where the job is located.

• Ineligible to participate in foreign talent programs sponsored by China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea.

🏝️ Benefits

• Competitive base salary.

• Performance-based incentives or bonuses (where applicable).

• Equity participation.

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents with generous employer premium contributions.

• Retirement savings with company matching.

• Paid parental leave.

• Inclusive family-building benefits.

• Fully remote work.

• Flexible paid time off.

• Company-wide seasonal breaks.

• Support for flexible work arrangements.

• On-the-job development.

• Cross-functional collaboration.

• Access to internal learning and development programs.