Head of Food Science

What you will own at Wildtype

• Build and lead a team of food scientists to improve the physicochemical, sensory, and functional properties of cultivated seafood products
• Lead the company’s research program for the biological basis of flavor
• Design and oversee food science research and development, including ingredient interactions, protein chemistry, food engineering, process optimization, scale up, sensory analysis, flavor development, and nutritional analyses
• Oversee procurement, analytics and formulation development
• Develop novel seafood products with various scaffold manufacturing technologies and cell integration approaches 
• Evaluate novel ingredients, preparations, and production methods
• Cross-functionally operate and have a good grasp of concepts at the intersection of food science, biology, engineering, and commercialization

How you’ll work with other teams

• Collaborate with product, scaling, and tissue engineering teams to develop new cultivated seafood products
• Work with our tissue engineering team to push the boundaries of traditional cell propagation and differentiation methodologies to larger 3D environments

What you bring to Wildtype

• An MS or PhD in Food Science
• 5+ years experience in Food Science, particularly in product development, testing, and scaling
• A deep understanding of protein chemistry (fats and oil chemistry a plus), hydrocolloids, food engineering, and component functionality & interactions in a food product as a whole
• At least 3 years of team leadership experience
• Contribute to an environment of scientific curiosity
• Mission-driven, resourceful, creative, positive disposition, and entrepreneurial
• Ability to move projects forward in the face of continuously evolving priorities and timelines 
• Preferred, but not required: knowledge of food processing technology, food cost and scaling, food sensory properties analyses, ingredient regulatory framework, and food storage and packaging
• Preferred, but not required: standard protein and small molecule separation and characterization techniques (e.g., SDS-PAGE, capillary electrophoresis, enzymology, NMR, FITR, CD, UV/Vis/Fluorescence spectroscopy, HPLC, LC/GC-MS)

What we’ll teach you 

• How to apply your experience in food science to the production of next-generation seafood
• How to work with and lead in a fast-moving, interdisciplinary team working at the leading edge of several fields

Impact Plan

• Within 1 month you will have adapted your experience in food science to Wildtype’s unique context. You will have set your professional development goals for the next twelve months.
• Within 3 months you will have assumed responsibility for Wildtype’s Food Science organization. 
• Within 6 months your efforts on R&D over the past six months will have yielded significant improvements to Wildtype’s salmon product. Your leadership responsibilities will expand as our Food Science team grows. You will have trained several new hires and built a high-performing team.
• Within 12 months you will be overseeing the research and development operations in the world’s first pilot-scale facility for cultivated seafood.

The hiring range for this position is $225,000 - $245,000, plus 90th percentile equity.

Location: this is an onsite role based in San Francisco, CA.