Process Engineering Lead

Nobell Foods is creating cheese and other dairy products from plant-derived dairy proteins for the 99% of people who are unwilling to compromise on taste and price. Nobell is made up of a team of passionate scientists, explorers, and storytellers on a mission to radically change the way we make food, so it’s better for you, the animals and the planet.  We are backed by Bill Gates’ climate fund Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Robert Downey Jr. If you believe in our mission and  are excited about our work, we would love to hear from you!

Expected Outcome

• Lead the scale up efforts across ingredient and food processing to enable the commercial production and sale of our first products

Responsibility

• You will work closely with our protein purification benchtop team to guide experimental objectives and translate R&D efforts into a commercial process taking it from development at the bench to pilot to commercial scale
• You will ensure that the process engineering team is optimizing experimental design combined with physics and chemistry to provide insights into cost effective processes and scalable infrastructure
• You will develop systems to capture key processing data, build a data infrastructure and provide the analytical insights to enable all stakeholders to access and share data
• You will work closely with our quality and regulatory teams to ensure that pilot processing and manufacturing processes meet or exceed all quality and regulatory standards
• You will build positive and meaningful relationships with vendors and 3rd party processors across the supply chain.
• You will champion and lead our ingredient stewardship, safety and quality efforts across the manufacturing supply chain
• You will lead the development of new IP applicable to protein purification and allied technologies
• You will provide information, analytics and insights around our scale up progress that will be shared with the Nobel Board

Key Deliverables Over the Next Year

• Scale our benchtop R&D process to pilot scale
• Work with existing partners and evaluate new processing partners pilot and test runs in the next 12 months
• Develop plan for commercial scaling, including resources and options

Required Skills and Experience

• You have a proven track record of leading process engineering teams, securing game changing talent, developing talent and leveraging support groups where needed
• You have a minimum of 10 years of relevant food industry experience with direct experience scaling an R&D benchtop process to commercialization
• You have experience with processing soybeans and are knowledgeable in protein separation technologies
• You have been responsible for bringing a new food ingredient or a novel food product to market with new ingredients
• You have an operator mindset who can connect dots, project manage and execute complex projects in a timely matter
• You are proficient at assessing risks, risk management and building contingency plans
• You have the ability to present clear, concise data analyses to a multidisciplinary audience
• You have excellent communication skills and can resolve personnel or business conflicts in an effective and timely matter
• You have have strong execution skills and you are focused on delivering results
• You are passionate about our mission of creating animal-free foods for the 99% of people who are unwilling to compromise on taste and price
• You have an advanced degree in Chemical Engineering or a related field
• Ability to travel within the US 25-35%