Principal Product Manager (Catalysis)

Join SandboxAQ, a leading AI-driven materials discovery platform. As the Principal Product Manager for Catalysis, you will own the end-to-end product strategy, vision, and roadmap, translating contractual objectives into product requirements and driving commercial expansion. You will work closely with application scientists and the business development team to understand customer needs and define product requirements. This is a unique opportunity to shape a category-defining AI platform for materials science at the intersection of national security, scientific discovery, and commercial scale.

Own the end-to-end Catalysis product strategy, vision and roadmap, ensuring alignment with contractual deliverables and commercial expansion.

About SandboxAQ

Experience in one or more major catalysis end markets, refining and downstream, petrochemicals and commodity chemicals, emissions control, or energy-transition catalysis such as electrolysis, carbon utilization, e-fuels or chemical recycling

Familiarity with computational chemistry workflows such as density functional theory (DFT), molecular dynamics, or microkinetic modelling, and the judgement to evaluate technical feasibility and roadmap trade-offs

Understanding of machine-learned interatomic potentials, spin polarization in transition-metal systems, and the evaluation of ML models against experimental or first-principles reference data

Track record building product-led growth motions for technical or scientific software, including self-serve adoption and land-and-expand commercial models

Responsibilities

• Build a deep understanding of customer needs and translate these into prioritized product requirements and specifications.
• Drive the roadmap from property and energetics prediction toward reaction-level modelling, ensuring that predictions can be validated against a customer's own process.
• Experience contributing to scope of offer, packaging and pricing decisions for technical software, or clear evidence of the commercial instinct to do so

Requirements

• Track record shipping AI/ML-driven scientific or engineering software to external, paying or contracted users; and shipping products where the ICP was not clearly understood or demand generation and funnel was not already in place
• Ability to engage both computational scientists and industrial, refining, chemical or equipment OEM partners, and to turn partner requirements into product requirements
• Ability to reason commercially across multiple end markets at once, sizing opportunities, comparing them on evidence, and sequencing entry rather than pursuing all of them simultaneously
• Has an ownership mindset, and a rigorous operational execution track record
• Strong domain grounding in materials science, catalysis, chemistry, or chemical engineering. Enough knowledge to sufficiently and credibly engage computational scientists, experimental validation partners, and domain SMEs
• 5+ years in product management, including ownership of a technically deep product sold to external customers. Must be able to operate in a product capacity within business models that are software and service oriented
• Bachelor's degree in Chemistry, Chemical Engineering or Materials Science or equivalent practical experience
• Comfort navigating deep ambiguity: translating unclear scientific and customer problems into structured roadmaps, success criteria, and measurable outcomes
• Prior product or business development engagement with catalyst manufacturers, chemical producers, refiners, or semiconductor ecosystem partners such as fabs, equipment OEMs and precursor suppliers
• Experience with multi-tenant SaaS, API governance, and enterprise security and compliance requirements
• An advanced degree in Computational Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, Catalysis, Materials Science, or a related field

Preferred

• Semiconductor or electronic materials process chemistry experience (e.g. deposition, etch, wafer cleaning, gas abatement etc)
• Familiarity with homogeneous or solution-phase catalysis alongside heterogeneous surface chemistry, and a view on where each approach applies

Pay

USD 163,200 - 306,000