Research Director, Anode Performance

Sila Nanotechnologies seeks an experienced people manager and a creative scientist with a desire to help co-invent the next generation of Li-ion battery materials. This position will involve using your people managing skills to inspire, facilitate, and enable a top-notch team of scientists to uncover relevant and actionable knowledge and effectively share this information with Sila’s Development teams. Through collaborative problem solving abilities, you will also contribute scientifically to increase our understanding in areas such as intrinsic material properties, material-cell integration, material-cell degradation mechanisms, analytical electrochemical testing, and electrolyte interactions.

Responsibilities

• Coordinate scientific work that reveals both processing-structure and structure-property relationships to enhance Li-ion battery material performance.
• Identify and mitigate the underlying chemical/electrochemical failure-modes and root-causes.
• Expand our fundamental knowledge of Si-anode based Li-ion batteries.
• Foster an environment of psychological safety to enable both creative scientific risk taking and deeply collaborative work.
• Recruit, interview, hire, and onboard extraordinary new scientists to expand our team’s bandwidth, capabilities, and diversity; help to guide their career growth and, when needed, career changes.
• Mentorship: offer deep thought, critical thinking, active listening, and collaborative brainstorming; set clear performance expectations and deliver regular feedback.
• Ensure that teammates have the resources they need to excel at their jobs by building and maintaining processes, systems, and infrastructure that help the Research group function efficiently.

Requirements

• Ph.D. in Chemistry, Physics, Materials Science, or related disciplines.
• 10-20 years of work experience desired (post Ph.D.), and experience in a startup environment.
• Demonstrated people management and team building experience, as well as technical leadership.
• Exceptional experimentation and materials characterization abilities.
• Collaborative problem solving: helping people share knowledge, ideas, resources, and strategies in order to solve challenging scientific problems.
• Brings out the best in people: works with teammates to emphasize their strengths and support their professional development.