Careers

Company: Hampford Research Inc.
Location: Stratford, CT (on site, 2 days/week minimum) 
Travel: 5–10% (customer visits and trade shows)

The chemistry inside dental materials, electronics, and coatings people use every day often starts in a small reactor in Stratford, Connecticut. Hampford Research has made it there for decades, taking custom molecules from lab development through pilot to commercial production for customers who can’t make them themselves. Sales, marketing, and the accounts that carry the business run through a single seat, and this seat sets commercial strategy directly with the CEO and President.

About the Company

Hampford Research has been making custom chemicals for specialty applications for more than 40 years (hampfordresearch.com). Customers bring chemistry they can’t make, either because their volumes are too small or because the IP matters too much to send overseas, and Hampford takes it from lab development through pilot to commercial production. The portfolio runs to photoinitiators, UV additives, energy-cured resins, and preservatives, reaching customers in electronics, adhesives, coatings, dental, and personal care.

Roughly 75 customers sit on the books against an eight-figure revenue base, and leadership is diversifying that base. The plant runs about 30 reactors in stainless steel, glass, and Hastelloy, and holds ISO 9001certification. This person would be one of the few commercial seats in a company built around the lab and the plant, and process discipline runs deep because the chemistry leaves little margin for error.

About the Role

Day to day, the Director of Sales & Marketing carries the largest accounts personally and directs a business development manager focused on new business, alongside technical support and customer service. You’d be a key member of the senior leadership team, providing guidance to the President and CEO on where the growth is, which accounts deserve investment, and when the strategy needs to move. Deals run 12 to 24 months from first conversation to shipping product, so the work is patience plus pressure applied in the right place. There’s no quota here; the bonus pays on results, not activity. You’d own the execution as well as the plan. And you’d stay close to what you sell: you can walk out of a pricing conversation and onto the production floor where the chemistry gets made.

The Goal

Twelve months in, you’ve carried the top accounts through the handover at their margins, and you know where the growth sits across the rest of the base. Leadership has a pipeline and a forecast it trusts, and the custom manufacturing story is yours to tell.

Outcomes You’ll Be Responsible For

• Hold and manage top accounts: The largest account carries several products at different stages, and most of the work is moving approvals and change control through their procurement, quality, legal, and business units. When the customer is the bottleneck, you tactfully push.
• Grow revenue inside the existing base: Across the roughly 75 customers on the books, find the untapped spend, qualify fast, and know when to move on rather than generate activity. The business development manager goes after new accounts. You go deeper into the existing ones, and you pass referrals their way for the first call.
• Run the portfolio on margin and order data: The CRM becomes the system of record for existing customers. You watch product-level margin and rolling 12-month open orders, and when an account starts to slip, you flag it early. 
• Own the custom manufacturing story: Marketing execution comes off the CEO’s desk. Sharpen the value proposition into messaging and capability materials, direct the web and LinkedIn content, and work the trade shows as an account development channel. The company anticipates outside creative help in 2027, so you’re setting direction, not producing it.

Skills Needed to Apply

Nice to have:

• You’ve run a 12 to 24 month pursuit from first contact to first shipping order and won it on technical partnership rather than price.
• A small account grew into a major one under you, and you argued another out of the portfolio with the evidence behind both.
• You’ve sold successfully inside an engineering or science-led company where stage-gate and change control are enforced.
• Marketing has been yours to run with little support, and an underused CRM became the system of record once you took it on.

Qualities

• Technically credible: Respect gets earned through substance rather than charisma. Chemists and plant-minded buyers decide quickly whether you know what you’re talking about.
• Tactfully persistent: Speeding a customer up without annoying them is the skill. Staying on a slow approval for a year is the job.
• Evidence-based optimism: Data and trends rather than hype, and a forecast you can defend with the why as much as the what.
• Works within the process and pushes it to go faster: Process discipline here is enforced across the company, not just from the top. Challenging a process with data lands. Routing around it doesn’t.
• Ownership without escalation: A missed forecast, a shrinking account, an approval stalled inside a customer: yours to diagnose and fix.
• Open to rethinking the go-to-market: Messaging, channels, and how this company presents itself are yours to reimagine rather than defend.
• Follows through: Your reputation with customers and colleagues rests on doing what you said you’d do.

Interested? Please email your resume to destiny@10thsttalent.com. 

Company: Hampford Research, Inc.
Location: Stratford, Connecticut (On Site, 5 days/week)
Travel: 5 – 10% (customer visits and conferences)

One seat owns the entire engineering function at Hampford Research: the engineering team, the facilities and maintenance crew, and every stage gate after R&D. It’s a company of roughly three dozen people, and the role reports to the President and sits on the management team. New product development runs through this function, and so do the cost models Hampford quotes from. Engineering reports directly to the President, and until now he’s led it himself. You’d take it over with a direct line to the top of the company.

About the Company

Hampford Research has been making custom chemicals for specialty applications for more than 40 years (hampfordresearch.com). Customers bring chemistry they can’t make themselves, either because their volumes are too small or because the IP matters too much to send overseas, and Hampford takes it from lab development through pilot to commercial production. The portfolio runs to photoinitiators, UV additives, energy-cured resins, and preservatives, reaching customers in electronics, adhesives, coatings, dental, and personal care.

Roughly 75 customers sit on the books against an eight-figure revenue base, and leadership is diversifying that base. The plant runs about 30 reactors in stainless steel, glass, and Hastelloy, and holds ISO 9001 certification. Most of the building is science-minded, and process discipline runs deep because the chemistry leaves little margin for error.

About the Role

The Engineering Manager oversees a team of four engineers, plus the small maintenance crew that keeps the facility running. Engineers own tranches of the portfolio: reviewing and closing chemical operating procedures on released batches, writing them for new products, improving processes already running, and diagnosing the batch that came back off spec. R&D answers whether the chemistry works at all. This role answers whether Hampford can run it in its own equipment, at the purity the customer specified.

You’d carry a product or two yourself alongside managing the team. The longest-tenured engineer has made nearly everything the plant has ever produced and still leads the pilot-scale work. Capital decisions sit with this seat, from which reactor gets replaced to what each project will cost. Onboarding is with the President for the first month, and the engineering meetings are yours within three months.

The Goal

Six months in, engineering runs without the President in it. The team has a manager it counts on, mentoring and the weekly cadence hold on their own, and the cost models going out to customers carry your review.

Outcomes You’ll Be Responsible For

• Stabilize and develop the engineering team: Manage a team of  four degreed engineers whose tenure runs from more than 40 years to 90 days, as well as a maintenance crew. Run the weekly one-on-ones and the weekly engineering meeting, and have mentoring going on its own inside three months. This is a quiet, deliberate group, so the one-on-ones do a lot of the work.
• Own engineering delivery through the stage gate: Everything after R&D lands here. Engineers hold their product tranches, and the plant-side answer is yours. Engineering and R&D work well together here, and the way that holds is with data on the table and a shared answer between what’s technically right and what runs reliably in the plant.
• Answer the feasibility question on new business: New business development is Hampford’s top priority for the next couple of years, and engineering is central to it. Customers come to Hampford because they need chemistry taken from lab scale into a plant. On the early calls, that’s an engineering answer. Sit in with the business development manager, say what the equipment supports and what it would take, and give that read while the project is still on paper.
• Stand behind the numbers on a quote: The engineer on a project builds the cost model. Yours is the last review before it reaches the customer, down to raw material, man-hours, reactor hours, cleaning, and waste. Which equipment needs capital, and what each project will cost, sits here too.
• Run the facility alongside engineering: Preventative maintenance, small projects, and the judgment on when a reactor or a motor is due for attention all run through this seat. This crew responds to being recognized for what they know and how they perform.

Skills Needed to Apply

• BS or MS in chemical engineering, put to work since. Chemical process engineering, chemical and biomolecular engineering, and accredited international equivalents count.
• 10+ years in specialty chemical manufacturing where the process is a reaction rather than a blend: synthesis, exotherms, runaway risk, purification to high-purity specification. You know what happens when a reaction runs hot or solidifies in a reactor, and why a process runs in glass instead of stainless.
• 5+ years leading degreed engineers directly, with five or more years spent as an individual contributor. 
• A one-on-one and team cadence people count on, and the hard conversations handled directly. You can point to a green engineer you brought along or an underperformer you coached.
• Cross-functional diplomacy under friction: you’ve held the seam between engineering and an R&D or quality group with different instincts, managed disputes as they happen, and argued them with data.

Nice to have:

• Scale-up owned from lab or pilot into commercial production, with the failure modes named: heat transfer, mixing, filtration, drying. Tech transfer counts.
• Direct experience with photoinitiators, UV additives, energy-cured resins, or coatings. Batch, fine, and pharmaceutical intermediate manufacturing all sit close by.
• A plant of 30 to a couple hundred people with no central engineering group, or a stretch at a larger site where you did the analysis and the vendor coordination yourself.
• ISO audits from the inside, plus OSHA PSM and process hazard analysis.

Qualities

• Technically credible: Respect gets earned through substance. The engineers and the maintenance crew decide quickly whether you know the chemistry and the equipment, and the institutional memory here sits with people who value getting their hands dirty.
• Diplomatic under friction: Disagreement gets engaged in the moment and face to face. Chemistry-minded and plant-minded colleagues get steered to an answer both can live with.
• Socially observant: You track how your team is doing without waiting for someone to raise a hand. If someone starts pulling back, the President and HR hear it from you early.
• Anticipates: Stays ahead of the work, so decisions get made on schedule and with the information already in hand.
• Pragmatic about process: High standards for safe, documented, repeatable procedure. A decades-old process is still open to renegotiation when the data supports it.
• Takes ownership: A missed date, a failed batch, a cost that came back wrong. Diagnosed and fixed, and leadership never hears it through the grapevine.

Interested? Please email your resume to destiny@10thsttalent.com.

• Competitive pay and full benefits (health, dental, vision, 401k match)
• Support continuing education and training
• Monthly team lunches (because good food makes everything better)
• Projects that matter—your work directly impacts customer success

What we’re looking for: Experienced professionals who can think on their feet and work well with others. You don’t need to know everything, but you should be curious and willing to dig into problems until you solve them.

If this sounds like your kind of work, send your resume to joinhri@hampfordresearch.com