Materials & Polymers Domain Specialist
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Job Summary
Patsnap is building evidence-backed materials datasets extracted from patents and scientific literature starting with an engineering-polymer curation program. You will own the delivery of this program end to end: managing any vendor relationships safeguarding scientific quality and connecting the curated output to Patsnaps ontology extraction and search teams. Beyond this program you will support a growing portfolio of materials data extraction indexing and search projects.
This is a hands-on scientific role not a pure project-management role. The hardest problems are chemical not infrastructural: deciding whether a Markush structures variable definitions were captured faithfully whether a repeat unit was explicitly disclosed or inferred by a curator whether a copolymers architecture was stated or assumed whether a property was bound to the right sample among a table of examples. You will be the final scientific arbiter on these calls and you must be able to make them yourself.
- Run the curation program.Own annotation guidelines calibration rounds delivery schedules and acceptance criteria with internal & external data curators. Track throughput cost and error rates by task type and report against pilot go/no-go criteria.
- Own scientific and run sampling-based QC on curated polymer data: gold-standard adjudication inter-annotator agreement held-out precision and coverage measurement and independent review of hard cases (generic/Markush structures repeat units composition and formulation tables measurement context). Evaluate AI/ML pre-annotation and extraction outputs against curated gold standards and turn error analysis into improved guidelines and dictionary rules.
- Steward the data evolution of the evidence composition and normalization-dictionary contracts; review normalization rules and dictionary releases; triage unresolved-term and ontology-gap queues with Patsnaps ontology team.
- Connect data to with search and product teams to translate curated relationships into indexing and multi-hop query capability; maintain query benchmarks that demonstrate downstream lift.
- Support the broader the same delivery and QC discipline to other materials data extraction indexing and search projects as the program expands beyond polymers.
These three are non-negotiable; everything else is trainable.
Polymer science in polymer science chemistry materials science or chemical engineering or a Bachelors with equivalent industry experience with command of polymer structure and representation demonstrated by the ability to:
- read and interpret repeat structural units (SRUs): bracket notation attachment points end groups and the difference between a monomer a repeat unit and the polymer itself;
- interpret generic and Markush polymer structures in patents variable substituents (R-groups) their textual definitions and scope and what a generic claim does and does not disclose;
- distinguish polymer architectures (linear branched block graft random network) and recognize when an architecture is stated versus merely permitted;
- parse composition and formulation descriptions: homopolymer vs. copolymer vs. blend constituent roles (base polymer crosslinker filler catalyst additive) quantity bases (wt% phr mol%) and nested or intermediate compositions;
- bind properties correctly knowing that a monomers property is not its polymers a components property is not the blends and a typical grade value is not a measured example result.
Hands-on formulation synthesis or characterization experience counts as much as academic credentials but this scientific judgment is the heart of the role and will be tested at interview against real patent examples.
Quality by experience managing quality through structured process lab quality systems (GLP/ISO) audit readiness structured review workflows or data QC by sampling and metrics rather than ad-hoc checking.
Delivery managing projects teams or external partners against defined deliverables schedules and acceptance criteria.
We are deliberately recruiting from several adjacent pools. Strength in one of these plus the core requirements above is a complete application you do not need to tick every box.
- Industry polymer/materials scientist moving toward data:formulation adhesives coatings or specialty-chemicals R&D ideally with exposure to digitalization master data or lab-informatics initiatives.
- Patent professional with chemistry depth:patent analyst searcher examiner or IP-firm scientist specializing in polymers or chemistry.
- Scientific content/curation operations:curation content QC taxonomy or ontology work at a scientific database or content provider provided you also have genuine chemistry or materials depth not solely content-workflow experience.
- Cheminformatics or materials informatics:research institute or industry roles in materials data structure representation or chemical databases.
- Curation operations mechanics: gold standards inter-annotator agreement sampling-based QC design.
- Patsnaps data contracts schemas and the Patsnap Materials Ontology.
- Patent data conventions where your background is on the science rather than the IP side.
- Knowledge-graph and search-evaluation concepts.
- Applied AI/ML literacy: evaluating LLM or ML extraction output (error analysis precision/recall gold-standard evaluation design) or working in AI-assisted annotation workflows. Model building is not required that stays with our engineering teams.
- Experience managing outsourced or distributed annotation/curation teams.
- Knowledge-graph or ontology experience (property graphs SKOS/OWL entity resolution).
- Scripting ability (Python or similar) for validation sampling and QC automation.
- Familiarity with information retrieval or search-relevance evaluation.
- Cheminformatics tooling (structure representations SMILES/InChI structure normalization).
Required Experience:
IC
About Company
Patsnap empowers IP and R&D teams with advanced AI to get better answers and make faster decisions. Increase IP productivity by 75% while reducing R&D wastage by 25%.
