Principal Engineer, Extractive Metallurgy

Location: Carson City, Nevada, or San Francisco, California, United States. The role requires travel to plant sites as needed.

Company

hirify.global recycles lithium-ion batteries and recovers, refines, and redeploys critical minerals into the supply chain while developing second-life battery energy systems.

What you will do

• Own the metallurgical basis of design for recycling and refining flowsheets from feedstock through refined product.
• Evaluate competing flowsheets and translate bench and pilot data into recommendations for commercial deployment.
• Define product quality specifications, diagnose impurity deportment, and drive metallurgical issues to root cause.
• Direct mineral processing and mechanical separation strategies for heterogeneous feedstocks, including comminution, liberation, classification, and physical concentration.
• Guide scale-up from bench and pilot stages to commercial operation, including mass and energy balances, equipment selection, and vendor test campaigns.
• Advise business development, operations, and process engineering teams on feedstock pathways, pricing, recovery, yield, reliability, and offtake markets.

Requirements

• 15+ years of experience in extractive metallurgy, mineral processing, metals process engineering, or equivalent expertise.
• Bachelor's or advanced degree in Metallurgical Engineering, Extractive Metallurgy, Mining Engineering, Mineral Processing, Materials Science, Chemical Engineering, or a related discipline.
• Experience deploying a flowsheet from pilot scale through commercial operation with accountability for plant technical performance.
• Deep industrial-scale experience in pyrometallurgy or hydrometallurgy; experience across both is preferred.
• Hands-on operating plant experience in a smelter, refinery, concentrator, or similar environment.
• Experience with comminution and physical separation of variable, heterogeneous feedstocks.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time strategic individual contributor role with regular interaction with the CTO and CEO.
• Opportunity to influence first-of-a-kind processes and commercial-scale plant deployment.
• Technical leadership includes raising metallurgical rigor through reviews and mentorship.
• Compensation is commensurate with experience.