Writing · Market map · Market as of September 27, 2026
Business Operations Manager, Lithium, at Mariana Minerals
An operations seat at a $1.5B minerals company building its first lithium plant. The best candidates aren’t at startups. They’re inside Houston’s energy complex.
- Company
- Mariana Minerals · Software-first critical minerals · Series B ($310M, August 2026) · ~$1.5B
- Location
- Houston, TX · in person
- Comp
- Not listed in the posting
- Posting
- Public JD · Posted September 2026
The role
Owns the performance framework for the lithium business: operational KPIs tied to cost, production and margin against plan. Partners with finance on budgets and forecasts, builds the stage-gate playbooks that take projects from origination to feasibility to construction, leads ISO 9001 certification, and runs leadership reporting from the field to the boardroom. Five to ten-plus years in business operations or program management; industrial experience a plus; on site in Houston.
The brief
What this hire has to fix
Lithium One, the company’s East Texas plant pulling lithium from oil-and-gas produced water, broke ground in late 2025 and targets commercial production in the first half of 2027. Between now and then, someone has to own the operating cadence that connects field data, finance and the board, and install the quality system a producing plant needs.
Has done it before
Ran program management or business performance at an energy, chemicals or battery-materials operator, close enough to the plant to know where the numbers come from. Or trained in consulting, then spent years inside an operator doing exactly that.
Would make you say no
Corporate strategy or finance with no time around operations. Has never worked on or near a site. Treats ISO 9001 as paperwork rather than an operating system.
The team today
Mariana grew from 17 people at the end of 2024 to 201 today. The team was built from industrial operators, not from the usual startup feeders.
Where the team sits
- San Francisco Bay Area93
- Greater Houston35
- Utah (Copper One)18
- Reno, Nevada7
- Detroit metro7
Where the team came from
Looking at each profile’s last three roles: roughly a third passed through Tesla, Redwood Materials, Lilac or Sila. About one in ten came from mining majors (Rio Tinto, BHP, Freeport-McMoRan), and about one in ten from oil, gas and chemicals. Only three came from strategy consulting (McKinsey or BCG), all into product roles. The business-operations function itself is led by people from a mining major and a battery-materials company.
Where the market is
Battery-materials startups are all building this function from small benches. Operations-classified seats are a thin slice of every startup peer; only the incumbent has a bench of any size.
Profiles = current employees with a public professional profile, which undercounts total headcount (Mariana reports 201). Operations seats = profiles classified in the operations function.
The field
Where this person sits today, sized from public profiles. The job title itself barely exists in Houston energy (88 people carry a business-operations, program-management or business-performance title there), so the lanes are defined by background instead.
- Consulting-trained, now inside Houston energy · Houston378Ex-McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Accenture, Deloitte, Kearney or Oliver Wyman, now in operations, strategy or finance roles at oil and gas, chemicals, mining or utility companies.Start here · KPI and reporting discipline, plus years next to real operations.
- Battery-materials alumni in operations · US273Passed through Redwood Materials, Lilac, Albemarle, Ascend Elements or EnergyX; now in operations roles.Know the process and the pace. Most would relocate to Houston.
- Quality and QA managers in industrial companies · Houston126Quality managers at energy, chemicals, mining and renewables companies.The ISO 9001 muscle. A specialist lane if certification is the urgent half.
- Program and business-performance titles in energy · Houston88Program managers, business-operations and business-performance managers at energy and chemicals companies (30 at the 13 largest).Exact title match, small pool. Worth a full sweep.
- Business ops at industrial startups · Houston23Business-operations, strategy-and-operations and chief-of-staff seats at 11–1,000-person energy and industrial companies.Thin, and every one of them is someone else’s key hire.
Our read
Start with consulting-trained people who have spent years inside Houston’s energy operators. They built KPI frameworks for a living, and they have been close enough to plants to know which numbers lie.
Run battery-materials alumni second. They know materials processes and the pace of a first plant, but most sit in California or Nevada, so budget for relocation to Houston.
Treat ISO 9001 as the scarce skill. If the best generalist hasn’t run a certification, pair the hire with a quality lead from the industrial lane rather than holding out for both in one person.
Method
- Company and people data from Crustdata’s index of public professional profiles and company records, pulled 27 September 2026.
- Lanes are defined by current or past employer, current industry, current title and location (city of Houston; suburbs are undercounted). Counts are approximate and overlap slightly where one person matches two lanes.
- Illustrative market map built from a public job posting. Not a client search, and no individual is named.
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