Research and Development Chemist
Bolton
Permanent opportunity
We are working with an established, independent chemicals company in Bolton who are engaged in alkyd, acrylic resin and water based polymer 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:
- Quality Control testing
- Competitor analysis
- Production investigation
- Advising production
- Designing new products including water-based lines
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 with developing new products and any new manufacturing processes at bench scale, fit for the plant to then use at production scale. This scale-up activity begins with the design of the product e.g. with a goal of reducing overall viscosity. In other cases, the company might need you to develop a product in line with customer requirements.
You will use miniature reactors to make small scales of product to begin with and allow for client assessment and further tests on their properties.
You will be part of a 37-person business, so it is important to have a strong sense of teamwork and willingness to do tasks around your role. For example, fetching samples for clients, laboratory housekeeping, interacting with customers, and calibrating equipment.
Your background:
We are ideally seeking someone who is a chemistry graduate, with at least 1 year experience in a similar field of product development, strong research skills, and knowledge of coatings and polymers would be beneficial. We are keen to engage with people who feel their skills are transferable to this.
The main laboratory techniques that the laboratory uses, as well as benchtop glassware-based reactors in fume hoods, are IR, GLC, DSC and UV/Vis. Experience would be ideal but not essential as full training can be provided.
Our client also offers a generous holiday allowance (25 days + 8 bank holidays, 33 days in total), an annual bonus, 12 weeks sick pay and life assurance of 4x salary. The working hours are Monday to Thursday 07.45 – 16.00 and Friday 07:45-15:00. There is some flexibility to start and end times.
On this occasion, LiCa Scientific is acting as an employment agency.