Research and Development Chemist

Research and Development Chemist

Bolton

£35,000+

Permanent opportunity

We are working with an established, independent chemicals company in Bolton who are engaged in resin manufacturing. They are committed to providing a service and range of resins without rival. Due to a forthcoming retirement in their team they are seeking an R&D Chemist who can support the development of new products within their laboratories.

What you’ll do:

You will be working on the development of new resin products and working closely with the manufacturing team, who are engaged in established product manufacturing.

The day to day tasks will be in a small team and include a range of potential duties.

The role is centred on the chemical methods of manufacture and their development. For example you will be working with clients who may require a certain solvent to be changed or another property addressed. An example could be reducing the use of a solvent to make a product water based for ecological benefits.

The R&D Chemist is primarily tasked to develop manufacturing processes at bench scale, fit for the plant to then use at production scale. This scale up activity begins with calorimetry and design of the product, perhaps with a goal of removing a solvent or adding a property like drying time. In other cases the company might need you to make a product due to client needs for example if a market opportunity presents itself.

You use miniature reactors to make small scales of product to begin with, 5 litre scales, and allow for client assessment and further tests on their properties.

You will be part of a 33 person business so it is important to have a strong sense of teamwork and willingness to do tasks around your role on the basis they need doing. For example fetching samples for clients, laboratory housekeeping, interacting with customers and calibrating equipment.

Your background:

We are seeking someone who is a chemistry graduate, with experience in a similar field of product development, strong research skills, and knowledge of coatings. A knowledge of polymers will be important and ideally a coatings knowledge would be ideal. This being said we are keen to engage with people who feel their skills are transferrable to this.

The main laboratory techniques that the laboratory uses as well as benchtop glassware-based reactors in fume hoods, are IR, GLC, DSC, UV/Vis and particle sizing.

Our client also offers a generous holiday allowance (25 days + 8 bank holidays, 33 days in total), annual bonus, and life assurance of 4x salary. The working hours are Monday to Thursday 08:30-16:30 with a 15:00 finish on Friday.

On this occasion, LiCa Scientific is acting as an employment agency.