Sandboxaq Principal Product Manager for Catalysis at SandboxAQ owning the Catalysis product vertical within AI-driven materials discovery platform. Responsible for translating contractual objectives and building a commercial product-led business.
Responsibilities
SandboxAQ’s AI Simulation (AISim) division develops and applies Large Quantitative Models (LQMs) that are grounded in physics, chemistry, mathematics and biology to simulate molecular behavior with scientific precision and accelerate discovery in the physical world across biopharma, chemicals, advanced materials, healthcare, and so much more.
Within AISim, ChemSim is SandboxAQ's AI-driven materials discovery platform. We are seeking an exceptional Product Manager to own the Catalysis vertical. This is a dual-mandate role. In the near term, you will be the product owner for catalysis within SandboxAQ's $500M CHIPS Act R&D award from the U.S. Department of Commerce, translating contractual objectives into product requirements and external fulfilment, whilst partnering with Program Managers to ensure successful milestone delivery. In parallel, you will build the commercial foundation that turns catalysis from a government-funded R&D workstream into a product-led business generating durable, recurring revenue from the broader materials and process-chemistry market.
Catalysis is one of the largest and most consequential application areas in applied chemistry. It underpins refining and downstream oil and gas, commodity and petrochemical production, emissions control, and the energy transition (hydrogen electrolysis, carbon utilization, e-fuels and chemical recycling etc) alongside semiconductor process chemistry and fine chemical synthesis. Across nearly all of these markets the bottleneck is the same: catalyst discovery and optimization remain slow, experimental and expensive, and the simulation tools available today answer narrower questions than the ones that actually decide a process. This is a once-in-a-career 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, spanning CHIPS Act contractual deliverables, vertical scientific depth, and commercial expansion into new markets.
Build a deep understanding of customer needs by working closely with Application Scientists and the Business Development team. Synthesize field insights, application benchmarking data, and market feedback into a clear picture of customer personas, and performance drivers, and translate these into prioritized product requirements and specifications.
Translate the program's catalysis objectives into clear product requirements, a vertical roadmap, and the evidence packages required for Fulfillment Notices to the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Define the dataset and model requirements for the vertical, chemical coverage, fidelity, and the benchmarking that determines where simulation investment is directed in partnership with our scientific and ML teams.
Drive the roadmap from property and energetics prediction toward reaction-level modelling, so that predictions can be validated against a customer's own process rather than assessed in isolation.
Quantify the value our catalyst products and services create for customers, such as gains in yield, selectivity, catalyst life, energy efficiency, and emissions. Equip Go-to-Market, Application Science, and Business Development teams with compelling value propositions, value models, and commercialization strategies that help them turn that technical performance into revenue, market share, and long-term customer partnerships.
Contribute to the catalysis commercial strategy with commercial leadership: customer segmentation, scope of offer, packaging, and pricing model across semiconductor, refining and petrochemical, emissions control and energy-transition customers.
Build, manage, and own strategic partner relationships at the product level: Work with fabs and equipment OEMs, precursor and specialty materials suppliers, refiners and chemical producers, catalyst manufacturers, national laboratories and validation partners, translating partner requirements into product features.
Define and track strategic product and commercial KPIs: Manage the metrics that matter most including, Model accuracy requirements, workflow adoption, customer segment expansion, and recurring revenue growth , and drive course corrections against OKRs.
