Senior Organic Chemist in Somerville, Massachusetts at Adiabatic Materials

Adiabatic Materials | Somerville, MA

Reinvent chemistry. Decarbonize industry. Electrify the future.

Today, most chemicals are still made using heat from burning fossil fuels in energy-intensive, polluting processes. Adiabatic Materials has developed a fundamentally new approach: an electrochemical synthesis platform that uses clean electricity instead of heat. The platform grew out of 15 years of Harvard research and has been demonstrated for a broad range of chemicals. Adiabatic recently spun out of Harvard and is scaling its operations in the Boston area.

Why Adiabatic might be great for you

We’re a small, early-stage team working on hard, meaningful problems. If you get energy from making things actually work and want your contributions to directly shape a company’s trajectory, this could be a great fit.

• You’ll be our first full-time synthetic organic chemist hire. You’ll own the chemistry around and beyond the electrochemical step, from route design to characterized, written-up results, working directly with our Chief Scientific Officer and the founders.
• Apply your synthetic expertise to a new platform. You’ll develop new reactions, establish new routes to key targets, and validate where our chemistry can outperform conventional approaches.
• Real ownership. As one of our early employees you’ll have more influence on direction than you would at a big company: you’ll help choose the problems we pursue, shape how we solve them, and influence how the R&D team grows, working with our Chief Scientific Officer, who is setting the overall research direction.
• Chemistry that is genuinely new. Electrochemical routes to pharmaceutical and fine chemical targets, with room to develop new reaction types.
• Equity and upside. You’ll share in the value you help create, alongside a mission-driven team that cares about science and sustainability.

The Role

We have built a novel and differentiated chemistry platform, and see many opportunities beyond what we have already explored. Your job will be to expand its capabilities and demonstrate its value on real pharmaceutical and fine chemical targets.

Working closely with our Chief Scientific Officer, you’ll identify and validate new reaction classes, devise routes that take advantage of our chemistry, and turn those ideas into robust experimental results. You’ll own the synthesis end-to-end: designing and running reactions, developing and optimizing new transformations, and rapidly purifying, characterizing, and reporting products.

Electrochemistry experience is not required. We can get an excellent synthetic chemist up to speed on our system quickly. What matters most is strong synthetic intuition, speed at the bench, and the ability to take a target from route concept through validated chemistry.

What You'll Do

Synthetic Route Execution: Take high-level direction, then develop and run whole routes independently: read the procedure, execute it correctly, adapt it where it doesn’t transfer, and deliver assigned targets.

Reaction Development: Develop and optimize conditions for reaction types beyond our current set, including those requiring standard air-free technique.

Electrochemical Steps: Learn the cell and mediator chemistry hands-on with our Director of Electrochemical Engineering, run the electrochemical step as one step among multiple, and help expand the reaction scope.

Purification and Characterization: Purify and characterize independently and quickly, and set a documentation and reporting standard the growing R&D team can follow.

Safety and Lab Standards: Work within the Greentown Labs safety environment from day one and run hazard assessments for every new reaction type you introduce.

Team and Technical Collaboration: Contribute in R&D meetings, work with our scientific advisors on open chemistry questions, and mentor our chemistry co-op informally on technique.

What We're Looking For

Many strong candidates don’t fit a standard blueprint. If you bring relevant experience and are excited about what we’re building, we encourage you to apply even if you don’t check every box.

Required:

• PhD in chemistry or a closely related field with a research focus in organic synthesis: new reactions, condition optimization, novel compounds
• Deep and diverse hands-on experience across many reaction types
• Standard air-free technique on a Schlenk line, in vials and flasks
• Independent purification by column chromatography and characterization by NMR, IR, MS, UV-Vis, HPLC and GC (some hands-on, some via analytical labs)

Nice to Have:

• 2-4 years of industry or startup experience is a plus, but not a hard requirement: if you’re coming straight out of a PhD, or have internship experience only, we’d still like to hear from you
• Retrosynthetic analysis
• Cheminformatics or computational chemistry
• Electrochemistry experience is not required. We already have expertise in this area in our team and expect you to learn it on the job within weeks

Working Style & Character:

• You are a team player who joins meetings and contributes, and who cares about building a great team culture as we grow
• You are good at taking high-level direction and running with it
• You have good judgement about when to ask for help: you don’t ask permission for everything, but you also don’t spend two days stuck on a five-minute question
• You are good at managing your own time against milestones and deadlines
• You operate safely without being reminded

Logistics

• Location: In-person at Greentown Labs, Somerville, MA
• Work style: Flexible, family-friendly schedule
• Compensation: $110K to $170K/year, plus meaningful equity and benefits (negotiable). The range is deliberately broad because it spans a fresh PhD through to five or more years of industry experience

How to Apply

Please submit your resume and include a few sentences about why you're excited about Adiabatic and how this role aligns with your experience. This is also an opportunity to highlight experiences that you feel are particularly relevant for the role. This doesn't need to be a formal cover letter; we just want to understand what motivates you.