Founding Scientist

One of First Momentum's portfolio companies (Imperial alumni, £2M raised) is looking for a Founding Scientist in London to lead the chemistry program and help release geothermal energy worldwide.

Here's the job description:

Deep tech startup unlocking stranded geothermal energy and critical minerals

London (on-site) | Full-time | £50–70k salary + founding equity

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Our Mission

Drilling advances are unlocking access worldwide to the Earth’s inner heat, creating the possibility for clean 24/7 power at civilisational scale. But reaching the heat is just the first step. The geothermal industry is still constrained by the chemistry of the fluids it brings to the surface. Today, plant operators are forced to reinject brines early to protect infrastructure from severe silica scaling, leaving usable energy and dissolved critical minerals out of reach. We raised £2 million to develop a silica removal retrofit module to boost geothermal power generation and create cleaner brines for co-production of energy and critical minerals from the same wells.

Bring your talent to help create a new category of geothermal operations, built not just to survive brine chemistry but to master it.

Tasks

Your Role

As the Founding Scientist, you will lead the chemistry programme from day one. Your mission will be to develop a **recoverable process that selectively removes silica from hot geothermal brines **, forming the scientific foundation for our first product and IP. You will work directly alongside the founder CEO and a process engineer to translate your results into continuous-flow prototypes and, ultimately, a pilot skid to be deployed at real power plants across Europe. Beyond developing the chemistry, you will generate data to secure pilot customers, de-risk the transition from lab to field, and join team trips to collect and test samples under live geothermal conditions.

This is a founding role: we want someone who can work independently within a very small team, move fast under uncertainty, and prioritise viable outcomes that bring us closer to real-world operations over perfect experiments.

Requirements

Who we are looking for

An ambitious scientist whose technical rigour is matched by the drive to turn lab results into commercial technology. Someone excited to build a company from its earliest days, work at the frontier of geothermal operations, and help reshape how clean energy and critical minerals are produced worldwide. Ideally, you have:

• A PhD in chemistry, chemical engineering, materials science, or closely related field, with proven ability to solve hard applied chemistry problems in aqueous real-world systems.
• Grounding in one or more of: silica chemistry, mineral precipitation, flocculation, polymer or surface chemistry, heterogeneous catalysis, water treatment, brine processing, or hydrometallurgy.
• Strong experimental and analytical chemistry skills, including the ability to design systematic experiments, build reliable assays, and interpret messy data without overfitting.
• Practical judgement around real-world process constraints, from recoverability and residual chemistry to operating windows, failure modes, and scale-up risk.

Benefits

Why join us

• Shape the company: Join early enough to shape the science, product, and culture with a path to leadership as we grow.
• Geothermal access: Operators, advisors from leading geothermal companies and investors with strong industrial networks.
• Physical impact: Build technology that leaves the lab: from real brine tests and customer pilots to adoption by geothermal plants.
• Founding team: Work in a small, high-trust founding team with the ambition to build something that does not exist yet.

Are you an exceptional scientist ready to build this company from the ground up?

Further details will be shared with shortlisted candidates under appropriate confidentiality.