Scientist I/II, Adsorbent Chemistry

Location: Boulder, CO   ·   

Reports To: Principal Scientist / Group Lead — Adsorbent Chemistry

Role Summary

You’ll be joining a small R&D team working on the resins and sorbents at the center of Alta’s separation process. This role establishes in-house resin synthesis and functionalization capabilities, develops analytical methods to characterize resin properties and performance, and drives iterative improvements in adsorbent materials to meet process performance, reproducibility, and scale-up requirements.

Key Technical Responsibilities

•  Resin Synthesis & Functionalization: Develop and implement in-house methods for porous resin synthesis, surface functionalization, and ligand attachment to produce adsorbents with defined chemical and physical properties.
•  Resin Characterization: Develop and qualify analytical methods for resin composition, functional group density, ligand loading, porosity, and particle properties — and know the limits of each method well enough to say when a result should not be trusted.
• Performance Evaluation: Connect those material properties to process outcomes — protein immobilization, adsorption capacity, selectivity, stability, and separation performance — working alongside our protein chemistry and process engineering teams.
•  Process Development: Establish reproducible synthesis and functionalization workflows at the bench, optimize reaction conditions, and identify the critical process parameters that govern resin quality.
• Tech Transfer: Translate those workflows into process specifications that let others produce the same resin at larger scale, and support integration into Alta’s adsorbent manufacturing workflows.

This is a bench-heavy role; expect roughly 70% hands-on laboratory work.

Communication and Documentation

• Maintain rigorous experimental records, author SOPs and test methods, and analyze and interpret data.
• Communicate results, risks, and recommendations clearly to cross-functional R&D and process engineering teams, to executives, and to external stakeholders.
• Plan, document, and execute detailed experiments for projects related to sorbent synthesis and characterization, including troubleshooting and identifying next steps. 

Required Qualifications

• M.S. or Ph.D. in chemistry, chemical engineering, materials science, polymer science, or a closely related field, with hands-on laboratory experience at the following levels:
• Scientist I: M.S. plus 3–5 years, or Ph.D. plus 0–2 years. A record of strong technical expertise and independent contributions to research projects.
• Scientist II: M.S. plus 5+ years, or Ph.D. plus 2–5 years. Proven ability to lead projects, method development, and data analysis.
• Hands-on experience making or modifying materials, such as polymers, porous solids, inorganic or hybrid materials, surfaces and coatings, catalysts, membranes, or functionalized particles, and relating how they were made to the properties they ended up with.
• Experience characterizing materials with several complementary techniques (for example spectroscopy, thermal analysis, microscopy, surface or porosity analysis, titration, elemental analysis, or chromatography), and the judgment to recognize when a measurement is unreliable or outside its valid range.
• Solid practical wet chemistry skills: running reactions, handling reagents safely, and turning chemical outcomes into numbers through quantitative assays, titration, gravimetry, or instrumental analysis.
• Demonstrated ability to run structured experimental campaigns: isolating variables, designing around confounds, and drawing defensible conclusions from noisy data.
• Rigorous documentation habits, including detailed lab notebook or ELN records and written procedures that other people could reproduce.
• Comfort working with limited supervision amid shifting priorities in a fast-paced R&D environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct experience making cross-linked porous beads by suspension, emulsion, or dispersion polymerization using a porogen or diluent to drive phase separation — styrene–divinylbenzene, methacrylate/acrylate systems, polyHIPE, or seeded-swelling (Ugelstad) routes.
•  Immobilization of proteins, peptides, or enzymes on a solid support, with measurement of loading, retained activity, and leaching.
• Post-polymerization modification of a porous support: chloromethylation, epoxide ring-opening, amination, and activation chemistries (NHS ester, maleimide, aldehyde, tosyl, epoxy).
• Working command of at least two porosity or particle characterization techniques, such as N₂/Ar physisorption (BET, BJH or DFT pore size distributions), mercury intrusion porosimetry, inverse size-exclusion chromatography, SEM, or laser diffraction particle sizing.
• Packed-bed column evaluation: breakthrough curves, dynamic binding capacity, pressure drop, and multi-cycle load/elute/regenerate studies.
• Materials lifetime and degradation testing: evaluating chemical and mechanical stability under aggressive process conditions over repeated use cycles.
• Design of experiments and statistical analysis
• Prior experience at a resin, chromatography media, or sorbent manufacturer.

Backgrounds We Welcome

We do not expect any one candidate to arrive with all of the above. Strong applicants have come to this problem from several directions, and we read all of them seriously:

• Bioseparations / protein chromatography — you understand how a protein moves inside a pore and why it sometimes cannot.
• Polymer and colloid chemistry — you have made porous materials and controlled their structure through formulation.
• Sorbent and separations engineering — you have built a functional material and used it for separations.
• Synthetic, surface, or bioconjugation chemistry: you have attached molecules to surfaces, particles, or bi

If you are strong in one of these and curious about the rest, apply.

Compensation & Benefits

The starting pay range for this position is $100,000 - $125,000 USD, plus equity, commensurate with educational background and work experience.

Benefits include:

•     401(k)
•     Medical, dental, and vision plans (or equivalent)
•     Flexible time off
•     Paid parental leave
•     Paid sick leave
•     Company holidays