Principal Specialist Innovation Translation📣 Job Ad

About the Role

Maaden is seeking a Principal Specialist Innovation Translation for a full-time position in Saudi Arabia. This role is central to bridging scientific discovery with industrial deployment, focusing on transforming high-potential technologies into scalable, investment-ready business solutions. The Principal Specialist ensures that innovation opportunities are technically proven, economically viable, and operationally integrated before significant capital is committed to industrial implementation. The position requires 5-10 years of relevant experience.

This role accelerates value creation by reducing technical uncertainty, validating performance, and establishing credible scale-up pathways to support confident investment decisions. Through rigorous techno-economic assessment and maturity governance, the Principal Specialist strengthens Ma'aden's ability to commercialize emerging technologies while minimizing delivery, operational, and investment risks. The role involves collaboration across Innovation, PD&E, operations, and external technology ecosystems to enable successful first-of-a-kind (FOAK) deployments and translate innovation investments into practical industrial capabilities, supporting long-term competitiveness, growth, and operational excellence.

Technology Translation and Scale-Up

• Establish scalable pathways to convert scientific concepts into industrially deployable solutions.
• Build robust design bases, operating parameters, performance criteria, and scale-up frameworks that enable confident progression through maturity stages.
• Accelerate technology maturation while minimizing unnecessary cost, time, and development risk.

Techno-Economic Value Creation

• Develop and maintain integrated techno-economic models that quantify value, risk, and investment attractiveness.
• Strengthen investment decisions by providing clear assessments of economic viability, performance assumptions, and critical value drivers.
• Enable evidence-based prioritization through continuous refinement of business cases and value realization forecasts.

Maturity Governance and Risk Reduction

• Establish structured maturity assessment frameworks that guide progression from pilot validation to industrial deployment.
• Reduce technical and commercial uncertainty through disciplined experimentation, testing, and readiness reviews.
• Provide objective recommendations on progression, redesign, partnership, acceleration, or termination of innovation opportunities.

Industrial Integration, Strategic Leadership, and Ecosystem Development

• Define technology integration requirements across process, operational, infrastructure, maintenance, and control environments.
• Ensure technologies are prepared for successful industrial adoption through robust engineering-ready design information and handover packages.
• Safeguard validated technology intent throughout engineering, commissioning, and FOAK deployment activities.
• Provide expert technical leadership that strengthens decision quality across innovation programs and technology investments.
• Challenge assumptions, validate technical claims, and apply rigorous scientific and engineering evaluation to complex opportunities.
• Embed fact-based decision-making, technical discipline, and continuous learning across the innovation portfolio.
• Build high-value partnerships with technology providers, research institutions, OEMs, and specialist organizations.
• Accelerate technology development by leveraging external expertise and innovation ecosystems.
• Capture and transfer scale-up knowledge, lessons learned, and best practices across innovation initiatives.

Indicators of Success

• Innovation concepts progress through maturity stages based on clear evidence, validated performance, and quantified value.
• Technology opportunities demonstrate reduced technical uncertainty and stronger investment readiness.
• Scale-up pathways and industrial design bases are established with confidence and traceability.
• First-of-a-kind (FOAK) deployments transition successfully from innovation into industrial execution environments.
• Technology investment decisions are supported by credible techno-economic analysis and risk assessments.
• Innovation projects deliver measurable business value while reducing implementation and operational risks.