About Redwood Materials
Redwood Materials was founded in 2017 by JB Straubel, co-founder and former CTO of Tesla, on a simple but radical idea: the critical minerals powering the energy transition already exist. They just need to come back. Today Redwood is the largest lithium-ion battery recycler in North America — recovering, refining, and redeploying critical minerals from end-of-life batteries back into the supply chain. On the energy side, Redwood has deployed the largest second-life battery project in the world, delivering power to AI data centers in months rather than years using proprietary energy architecture engineered entirely in-house. The company is profitable, the market it operates in is projected to grow 20 to 50 times over the next decade, and Redwood is the only company with the supply chain, the technology, and the operational scale to lead it.
Manager, Commodities Management & Operations
The Manager, Commodities Management & Operations will lead the day-to-day operational management of Redwood’s battery-material and commodity activities. This role will ensure the accurate, efficient, and commercially aligned execution of material purchases, internal production flows, inventory movements, logistics, sales commitments, and related financial transactions.
Redwood receives end-of-life batteries and battery-containing products, recovers and refines critical minerals, and transforms those materials into products used in new battery manufacturing. Redwood may also strategically purchase, sell, and manage battery materials and commodities to support customer requirements, optimize material flows, and expand the circular battery supply chain.
This role serves as the operational connection among Commercial, Trading, Supply Chain, Logistics, Production, Finance, Accounting, Legal, Compliance, and Technology. The Manager will translate commercial agreements and commodity strategies into executable operational plans, ensuring that physical material movements, system transactions, contractual obligations, costs, and financial outcomes remain aligned.
The ideal candidate combines strong people leadership with hands-on operational capability, commercial judgment, analytical rigor, and an understanding of physical commodity or industrial-material flows. This individual should be comfortable building scalable processes in a fast-changing environment and driving issues from commercial agreement through final operational and financial resolution.
Responsibilities Will Include
Team Leadership and Management
- Lead, coach, and develop a team responsible for commodities administration, commercial execution, material-flow coordination, transaction management, reporting, and operational support.
- Establish clear responsibilities, priorities, service levels, and performance expectations for the Commodities Management and Operations team.
- Oversee workload allocation and daily execution across purchasing, sales support, logistics coordination, inventory reconciliation, documentation, and financial settlement activities.
- Develop team capability through structured onboarding, cross-training, documented procedures, ongoing coaching, and performance feedback.
- Establish scalable processes, standard operating procedures, controls, and training materials to improve consistency, accuracy, and accountability.
- Foster a culture of ownership, responsiveness, collaboration, commercial awareness, and continuous improvement.
Commodity and Commercial Execution
- Manage the operational lifecycle of battery-material and commodity transactions, from commercial agreement and order creation through physical movement, inventory recording, invoicing, settlement, and closeout.
- Translate sourcing, sales, recycling, and trading agreements into clear operational requirements for internal teams.
- Coordinate the execution of material purchases, sales, internal transfers, and other commodity movements involving materials produced by Redwood or strategically procured from external partners.
- Ensure commercial terms are accurately reflected in purchase orders, sales orders, contracts, shipment instructions, inventory records, invoices, and internal systems.
- Serve as a central escalation point for operational issues affecting commodity purchases, sales, deliveries, inventory, pricing, documentation, or settlements.
- Support supplier and customer relationships by ensuring timely communication, accurate execution, compliance with agreed terms, and high service levels.
- Coordinate with Commercial and Trading teams to understand customer commitments, supplier obligations, pricing structures, volume expectations, and delivery requirements.
- Help identify operational risks, constraints, and cost drivers that could affect transaction economics or customer and supplier performance.
Material Flow and Logistics Coordination
- Coordinate with Supply Chain, Logistics, Production, Warehouse, and site operations teams to align commercial commitments with physical material availability and movement.
- Maintain visibility into inbound, outbound, and internally produced commodity flows across Redwood facilities and external locations.
- Support the development and execution of material-allocation plans based on production output, inventory positions, customer requirements, supplier commitments, quality status, and commercial priorities.
- Ensure transportation, storage, handling, packaging, documentation, and delivery requirements are clearly communicated and executed.
- Monitor shipments, delivery schedules, material availability, and operational constraints, proactively escalating risks to stakeholders.
- Partner with Logistics to evaluate transportation costs, routing decisions, service levels, and execution issues that affect commodity economics.
- Coordinate the resolution of delayed shipments, quantity discrepancies, damaged materials, rejected loads, documentation issues, and other exceptions.
- Maintain accurate records and traceability for physical commodity movements across internal and external systems.
Inventory and Position Management
- Partner with Production, Warehouse, Supply Chain, Commercial, and Finance teams to maintain accurate visibility into commodity inventories and available material positions.
- Monitor inventory balances, committed volumes, incoming material, production forecasts, customer allocations, and other relevant supply-and-demand information.
- Support the reconciliation of physical inventory, system inventory, commercial commitments, and financial records.
- Identify inventory discrepancies, unallocated material, aging positions, fulfillment risks, and other operational exceptions requiring resolution.
- Establish controls and reporting processes that improve material traceability and reduce transactional or inventory errors.
- Participate in physical inventory audits, cycle-count reviews, reconciliation activities, and month-end or quarter-end close processes.
- Provide reliable operational data to support purchasing, sales, production planning, working-capital management, and commodity strategy.
Pricing, Cost, and Financial Coordination
- Support the operational administration of commodity-pricing mechanisms, including fixed pricing, index-based pricing, provisional pricing, adjustments, fees, logistics costs, and other contractual components.
- Coordinate with Commercial, Trading, Finance, and Accounting to ensure that applicable prices, quantities, units of measure, payment terms, and adjustments are accurately recorded.
- Maintain visibility into purchasing, processing, handling, transportation, storage, and other operating costs associated with material flows.
- Help evaluate transaction economics by consolidating operational costs, commercial terms, material values, and execution results.
- Partner with Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable to resolve invoice discrepancies, missing documentation, pricing issues, payment holds, credits, and settlement exceptions.
- Support timely and accurate accruals, invoicing, payment processing, revenue recognition, and financial close activities.
- Establish clear approval controls and escalation paths for pricing, quantity, invoice, and settlement exceptions.
- Provide operational insights that help Commercial and Trading teams improve margins, customer mix, supplier performance, and material-flow decisions.
Systems, Data, and Reporting
- Maintain accurate, complete, and organized transaction records across ERP, CRM, inventory, logistics, financial, and internal operational systems.
- Ensure data integrity and traceability across purchase orders, sales orders, contracts, shipments, receipts, inventory records, invoices, and settlements.
- Develop and maintain dashboards, reports, and analytics covering commodity volumes, inventory positions, commitments, shipment status, service levels, costs, margins, and operational performance.
- Establish and monitor key performance indicators related to transaction accuracy, on-time execution, inventory reconciliation, invoice resolution, customer and supplier service, and process efficiency.
- Deliver regular reporting and operational insights to Commercial, Finance, Supply Chain, and executive leadership.
- Analyze transaction and material-flow data to identify risks, bottlenecks, cost drivers, process gaps, and improvement opportunities.
- Partner with Technology, Product, and Data teams to define system requirements, improve reporting capabilities, and automate manual processes.
- Support the design and implementation of scalable tools and workflows that accommodate increased transaction volume and business complexity.
Risk, Compliance, and Process Improvement
- Ensure commodity-management activities comply with contractual requirements, internal controls, company policies, and applicable regulatory standards.
- Coordinate with Legal, Compliance, Finance, Quality, Environmental Health and Safety, and other stakeholders to address transaction-specific risks and requirements.
- Maintain complete and audit-ready documentation supporting purchases, sales, material movements, pricing, invoices, and settlements.
- Identify operational, financial, contractual, inventory, logistics, and counterparty risks and ensure they are appropriately escalated and addressed.
- Develop controls that reduce the risk of incorrect pricing, duplicate payments, missed obligations, inventory losses, or unauthorized transactions.
- Lead root-cause analysis and corrective-action efforts for recurring operational or transactional issues.
- Identify and implement process improvements that increase accuracy, responsiveness, visibility, control, and scalability.
- Contribute to commercial and operational planning by providing data-driven recommendations on material flows, capacity constraints, costs, and execution risk.
- Champion best practices for safety, compliance, responsible sourcing, and operational excellence across commodity programs.
Desired Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Business, Operations, Supply Chain, Finance, Economics, Engineering, or a related field.
- Seven or more years of relevant experience in commodity operations, commercial operations, physical trading operations, supply chain, procurement, logistics, materials management, or industrial operations.
- At least two years of experience managing and developing employees.
- Experience supporting the physical purchase, sale, transportation, inventory management, or settlement of commodities, metals, chemicals, battery materials, recycled materials, or other industrial products.
- Experience in batteries, battery materials, critical minerals, metals, mining, recycling, chemicals, or energy-related commodities strongly preferred.
- Demonstrated understanding of the relationship among commercial agreements, physical material flows, logistics, inventory, costs, invoicing, and financial outcomes.
- Experience managing operational execution across multiple transactions, customers, suppliers, locations, or material types.
- Strong analytical skills with the ability to interpret operational and commercial data, identify discrepancies, and translate findings into action.
- Experience with commodity pricing, index-based pricing, transaction economics, or margin analysis preferred.
- Working knowledge of inventory reconciliation, purchasing, order management, invoicing, settlement, and financial close processes.
- Hands-on experience with ERP, CRM, inventory, logistics, or commodity-management systems; familiarity with Oracle, HubSpot, or equivalent platforms is a plus.
- Experience developing reports, dashboards, performance metrics, and operational controls.
- Proven ability to build scalable processes and manage complex cross-functional workflows.
- Strong organizational skills and exceptional attention to transactional, financial, and material details.
- Excellent communication and stakeholder-management skills, with the ability to work effectively across Commercial, Operations, Finance, Supply Chain, Technology, and external partners.
- Entrepreneurial mindset with a bias for action, strong ownership, and the ability to thrive in a dynamic and rapidly evolving environment.
- Passion for sustainability, responsible resource management, and advancing the circular economy.
Physical Requirements
- Ability to perform essential job functions in compliance with ADA, FMLA, and other relevant federal, state, and local regulations, including meeting both qualitative and quantitative productivity standards.
- Ability to maintain regular and punctual attendance in line with ADA, FMLA, and applicable standards.
- Ability to wear personal protective equipment, including safety gloves, helmets, and eyewear, or additional PPE when required.
- Ability to communicate clearly and effectively on the telephone and through virtual and in-person meetings, including listening and speaking.
- Ability to travel to Redwood facilities, supplier locations, customer sites, warehouses, or logistics partners as business needs require.
Working Conditions
- Work may be performed in an office setting, manufacturing facility, warehouse, outdoor job site, or other industrial environment.
- Periodic exposure to loud noise, dust, fumes, chemicals, moving equipment, and extreme heat or cold.
- May be required to work evenings, weekends, or extended hours to support time-sensitive material movements, transaction deadlines, or operational issues.
- The position is full-time. Compensation will be commensurate with experience.
The position is full-time. Compensation will be commensurate with experience.
We collect personal information (PI) from you in connection with your application for employment with Redwood Materials, including the following categories of PI: identifiers, personal records, professional or employment information, and inferences drawn from your PI. We collect your PI for our purposes, including performing services and operations related to your potential employment. If you have additional privacy-related questions, please contact us at [email protected].