Principal Product Manager, Material Science

The role

You will own the end-to-end Catalysis product strategy, vision, and roadmap. This includes managing CHIPS Act contractual deliverables and building a commercial foundation for the ChemSim materials discovery platform.

What you will do

• Own the end-to-end Catalysis product strategy, vision and roadmap.
• Build understanding of customer needs by working with Application Scientists and Business Development.
• Translate program catalysis objectives into product requirements and evidence packages for the U.S. Department of Commerce.
• Define dataset and model requirements in partnership with scientific and ML teams.
• Drive the roadmap from property prediction toward reaction-level modelling.
• Quantify value created for customers to equip Go-to-Market and Business Development teams.
• Contribute to catalysis commercial strategy including segmentation, packaging, and pricing.
• Build and manage strategic partner relationships with fabs, OEMs, and manufacturers.
• Define and track strategic product and commercial KPIs.
• Develop and defend build-vs-buy and build-vs-partner recommendations.

Required qualifications

• 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.
• Strong domain grounding in materials science, catalysis, chemistry, or chemical engineering.
• Track record shipping AI/ML-driven scientific or engineering software to external, paying or contracted users.
• Experience contributing to scope of offer, packaging and pricing decisions for technical software.
• Ability to engage both computational scientists and industrial, refining, chemical or equipment OEM partners.
• Ability to reason commercially across multiple end markets at once.
• Comfort navigating deep ambiguity.
• Has an ownership mindset and a rigorous operational execution track record.
• Bachelor's degree in Chemistry, Chemical Engineering or Materials Science or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to have

• Experience in one or more major catalysis end markets, refining and downstream, petrochemicals and commodity chemicals, emissions control, or energy-transition catalysis.
• Familiarity with computational chemistry workflows such as density functional theory (DFT), molecular dynamics, or microkinetic modelling.
• Semiconductor or electronic materials process chemistry experience.
• Familiarity with homogeneous or solution-phase catalysis alongside heterogeneous surface chemistry.
• Understanding of machine-learned interatomic potentials, spin polarization in transition-metal systems, and evaluation of ML models.
• Track record building product-led growth motions for technical or scientific software.
• Prior product or business development engagement with catalyst manufacturers, chemical producers, refiners, or semiconductor ecosystem partners.
• 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.

Benefits

• Competitive base salary
• Performance-based incentives or bonuses
• Equity participation
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Retirement savings with company matching
• Paid parental leave
• Inclusive family-building benefits
• Fully remote
• Flexible paid time off
• Company-wide seasonal breaks
• Support for flexible work arrangements
• Access to internal learning and development programs

About the company

SandboxAQ is a high-growth company delivering AI solutions that address some of the world's greatest challenges. The company emerged from Alphabet Inc. as an independent, growth capital-backed company in 2022.