Director of Fermentation - Utah, United States - GForce Life Sciences

Description

Director of Fermentation

Summary

• Our client, a venture funded, sustainable aviation fuel development company has engaged GForce Life Sciences to provide an experienced Director of Fermentation to join their expanding team. This individual will orchestrate the scientific and operational aspects of fermentation, impacting quality, product performance, and revenue generation. Their leadership will not only shape the fermentation department but also provide critical technical support across the organization. This role requires an experienced chemical engineer, biochemical engineer, or microbiologist that will be responsible for overseeing the research and development (R&D) efforts of our client's fermentation process.

Duties / Expectations of Role

• Lead and mentor a team of scientists, engineers, research associates, and technicians developing and optimizing the fermentation bioprocess.
• Support continuous improvement of laboratory infrastructure, operations, workflows, and protocols.
• Design, coordinate, and lead experiments to evaluate operating conditions, hardware changes, medium formulations, feeding strategies, and other process conditions to improve key performance indications in small scale bioreactors.
• Work with relevant stakeholders to identify fermentation process requirements that enable effective downstream processing for product separation and purification.
• Process development responsibilities include development, optimization, and characterization of robust cell culture processes used in fed-batch and continuous manufacturing operations to produce commercial biological products.
• Responsible for developing and implementing the next generation of upstream manufacturing
• processes to improve productivity, increase robustness and throughput, and lower costs of manufacturing.
• Design small scale fermentation models to enable rapid strain characterization at medium to

high throughput experimentation.

• Apply scientific and engineering principles, research theories, models, and hands-on technical

expertise to design and plan experiments and research activities.

• Perform data analysis to track key performance indicators and guide experimental planning.
• Collaborate with other teams including engineering, pilot and scale-up operations, downstream processing, and product development.
• Incorporate input from various stakeholders across departments in defining and executing experimental plans.
• Work with other teams in the development and implementation of systems and processes to support the quality of fermentation processes and products.
• Perform tech transfer from lab to pilot production scales, providing hands on support as required.

Mandatory Requirements

• PhD in Chemical Engineering, Biochemical Engineering, or Microbiology.
• 10+ years' experience in fermentation (R&D, operations, and/or engineering).
• 4+ years' experience leading/managing teams of scientists and engineers with demonstrated experience mentoring and developing team members.
• Experience running fermenters including setup, sampling, process development (including

downstream processing) and troubleshooting hardware and software.

• Fermentation experience at the lab-scale, including the end-to-end operation of bioreactors and

development of standard operating procedures (SOP's).

• Fermentation experience at pilot scale (500L+) across multiple products.
• Experience using statistics and design-of-experiments based approaches to strengthen experimental design and enable robust data analysis.
• Experience developing and optimizing robust, scalable industrial fermentation processes.
• Strong hands-on-wet-lab and fermentation skills.
• Able to develop new systems/scale-up innovations.

Term & Start

• Full time direct hire opportunity
• On-site 5 days a week in Salt Lake City, UT
• Benefits included – health, dental, vision, 401k, employee stock options