R&D Lead - Automotive Heated Glass & Defogger

Location: Peenya, Bengaluru (on-site only)
Type: Full-time
Compensation: Competitive fixed salary + meaningful ESOP
Experience: 3+ years in in automotive glass paste development and deployment (defogger, busbar, antenna or heated-glazing pastes)
About Anuna Labs
Anuna Labs is an advanced materials deeptech startup developing air-stable copper nanoparticle inks and pastes as a drop-in replacement for silver. Our core differentiation is sintering in ambient air at — no inert atmosphere, no vacuum, no specialised equipment which removes the oxidation barrier that has kept copper out of high-volume metallization for three decades.
We are commercialising across:
• Solar cell metallization (PERC / TOPCon / HJT)
• Printed and flexible electronics
• Automotive defogging and heated glass
• Semiconductor packaging and EMI shielding
• Electrocatalysis and hydrogen generation
Who This Role Is For
This is for a paste person who has lived on the glass line, someone who has spent years making silver pastes print, fire and solder on automotive glass, and wants to be the one who finally gets copper through the furnace and through OEM validation.
You will not be handed a defined scope and a checklist. You will define the scope. You will build and lead our automotive glass programme on the copper platform, sit across the table from India's automotive glass makers and the OEMs they supply, and be accountable for whether copper actually works on their print lines, in their furnaces and in their validation plans.
If you have stood at a flat-glass screen printer ahead of a bending furnace, chased silver bleed-through across the black band, watched a connector pull off a busbar after thermal cycling, or argued with a furnace engineer about whether the problem is the paste or the profile, this is the seat.
What You'll Own
• Formulation and optimisation of copper-based shielding materials
• Rheology design and control
• Binder / glass frits / organic vehicle selection
• Cure and sintering window development
Team and customer
• Building and leading a team of materials scientists and process engineers for the automotive programme
• Running joint development programmes with automotive glass makers, trials on their lines, on their timelines, with their data and supporting them through their OEMs' validation and PPAP
• Technical documentation, IP generation, spec control, and the automotive quality documentation a new paste supplier needs (PFMEA, control plans, PPAP)
Eligibility
This role is strictly for people who have developed a conductive paste themselves and taken it through deployment on a customer's line. Formulation-only or process-only backgrounds will not be shortlisted.
• M.Tech / M.Sc / PhD in Materials Science, Metallurgy, Glass & Ceramic Technology, Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, Nanotechnology, or a related discipline
• 3+ years of hands-on conductive paste development for glass — defogger, busbar, antenna or heated-glazing pastes at a paste or enamel manufacturer, or in the materials/process R&D team of an automotive glass maker
• Demonstrated ownership of a paste that went through a glass maker's line trials and OEM validation into production or pilot supply
• Direct working experience printing and firing on automotive glass lines — screen printing on flat glass, and co-firing through bending/tempering or laminating cycles
Good to Have
• Experience at a supplier of automotive glass silver pastes or obscuration enamels, or at a glass maker supplying passenger-vehicle OEMs
• Lead-free connector soldering on glass (indium-based alloys) or conductive-adhesive attachment
• Busbars for coated heated windscreens, camera/ADAS heating zones, or printed antennas on glass
• Low-temperature-cure conductive inks for polycarbonate glazing or heater films
• Digital (inkjet) printing of conductive or enamel inks on glass
• Working knowledge of automotive quality systems — IATF 16949, APQP/PPAP, PFMEA — and OEM validation plans
• Patents or publications in thick-film conductors on glass, glass enamels, or glass–metal interfaces
• Experience scaling a lab formulation into repeatable kilogram-scale production
• Exposure to other metallization — solar, printed electronics, semiconductor packaging
Please Apply Only If
• You can work full-time, on-site in Peenya, Bengaluru
• You are comfortable being hands-on in a lab
• You want ownership and consequence over stability and defined scope
• You have conviction on the technology of copper replacing silver

Work arrangement
No