About the role
WHO WE ARE
Kunin Technologies is revolutionizing the critical mineral supply chain by implementing advanced separation systems with traditional unit operations to capture value from overlooked resources. Ore grades are falling globally, and conventional extraction leaves recoverable metal in material that mines and refineries write off as waste. Tailings, effluents, and legacy sites hold real value that existing separation technology can't reach economically.
Utilizing Kunin Technologies’ proprietary mass manufacturable nano-separation systems, significantly more value can be produced from each resource, reducing waste, and unlocking domestic critical mineral production. Kunin is developing metal recovery flowsheets and reprocessing facilities from operating refinery effluents, decades-old tailings stockpiles, and even centuries-old Superfund sites.
Kunin is currently a team of 10 across process engineers, polymer scientists, and organic chemists with a 10k sq. ft. hydrometallurgical & organic synthesis lab in Chattanooga, TN. Kunin is pushing forward metal recovery projects across scandium, gallium, germanium, copper, cobalt, rhodium, and gold.
To achieve metal abundance, humanity must bring separation science down its own Moore’s Law: fix the idiot cost index for micro and nano scale separation materials. This requires mass manufacturing novel ion-exchange media form factors which previously struggled from high costs.
WHAT YOU'LL LEAD
You join Kunin’s Capital Projects team, whose goal is 100 critical metal projects in 10 years. You will be tasked with a specific project that Kunin is developing (or co-developing) and own its full technical scope. Success is driving that project forward through a stage-gated process, including killing it as early and cheaply as possible when that's the right answer. If your project doesn't survive a gate, you move to the next one. This includes:
- Leading flowsheet development end to end: comminution and physical concentration through leaching, solid–liquid separation, ion exchange, solvent extraction, precipitation, crystallization, electrowinning, and product polishing, plus residue disposition, reagent regeneration, water balance, and effluent management.
- Owning techno-economics of the flowsheet to assess project viability and inform company Go/No-Go decisions.
- Determining where scaled testing is necessary to de-risk key unit operations, define critical engineering parameters, and produce sufficient product samples for offtake partners.
- Leading pilot testing where necessary to collect above data and produce the necessary samples.
- Leading basic and detailed engineering including process design, major equipment design, brownfield integration design, FEED, and the complete engineering package including managing EPCM support.
- Identifying, vetting, and selecting key process technology vendors from pilot through commercialization.
- Leading Kunin’s facility construction scope including managing EPCM support.
- Ensuring successful facility start-up driving the facility to nameplate capacity producing on-spec product.
WHO YOU ARE
- 10+ years in process engineering including both flowsheet development and detailed engineering.
- Capable of developing a hydrometallurgical process from paper, to lab, to pilot, to construction, and even to operation.
- Willing to author PFDs, P&IDs, equipment specifications regardless of level of experience.
- Intentional about project stage-gates and comfortable killing a project and moving onto the next.
- Excited about working hard to push projects farther, faster in an early-stage startup environment with extreme autonomy, opportunity, & high expectations.
- Confident enough to lead a team of talented people, and humble enough to listen to them. Eager to change your mind in the face of new information.
COMPENSATION
This role will pay $140,000 - $200,000 depending on experience, plus equity. Health, Dental, & Vision benefits included.
ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS
- Must be willing to relocate to Chattanooga, TN and available to travel to customers across the United States, Canada, Brazil, South Africa, and Australia for site visits, on-site testing, detailed engineering, and start-up. Relocation support will be provided.
Chattanooga is more beautiful than expected, and Tennessee has no income tax.
WORK AUTHORIZATION
- Kunin will do whatever it can to secure work authorization for the right candidate.
"The Whole World Is Ion-Exchange And The Rest Are Merely Details!"
Dr. Robert Kunin of Rohm and Haas, The Pioneer of the Ion-Exchange Industry, 1951