Head of Product Development - Nuritas

COMPANY BACKGROUND / CULTURE

Nuritas is revolutionizing the discovery of novel, natural and scientifically proven bioactive ingredients that enable their partners to create better or new product solutions for their customers. The company’s disruptive computational approach to discovery uses artificial intelligence, deep learning, and genomics to rapidly and efficiently predict and then unlock the most health-benefiting components hidden within plants and natural food sources, called peptides. Nuritas has established the world’s largest peptide knowledge base. Through its discoveries, Nuritas wants to firstly manage and improve human health and secondly help make our food system more sustainable by replacing current unwanted ingredients and molecules with more natural and sustainable ones.

Since its founding in 2014, Nuritas has developed proprietary AI and DNA analysis to enhance the accurate analysis of molecules and peptides in food. The new technology is significantly faster with unparalleled accuracy compared to traditional methods of discovery. Founded by research scientist Dr. Nora Khaldi, Nuritas has received significant backing to develop its technology.

Nuritas has built and grown a unique discovery platform N™ (Nuritas Peptide Finder). The N™ artificial intelligence platform with wet lab has been shaped and trained on years of proprietary experimental data as well as curated structured and unstructured data allowing it to predict novel peptides with targeted efficacy. Beyond efficacy, N™ can also predict with huge accuracy the chemical and physical characteristics of peptides needed to have clinical and commercial viability, such as cell penetration or bioavailability.

Nπϕ has attracted high-profile partnerships and customers, including Nestle, Mars, Sumitomo Corporation and Pharmavite. Nuritas’ science-proven bioactive peptides are unlocked from plants and natural food sources, with applications across functional foods, supplements, medical food, cosmetics and food technology.

Separately, the beating heart of Nuritas is their incredibly passionate team. Nuritas have an international team comprising over 16 different nationalities with offices in Dublin and Connecticut. They are also very proud of their gender balance with 50% women and men across the team. The Nuritas Data Scientists, Biologists, AI Engineers, Chemists, Commercial and Operations teams bring innovation, passion and flexibility to their work every day. With an extremely strong team, advisory board, investors and collaborations, the Nuritas mission is to unlock the benefits of nature and improve the lives of billions.

THE OPPORTUNITY

Job description of Head of Product Development

The Head of Product Development is responsible for taking Nuritas ingredients, developed with the Magnifier platform, and visualizing, commercially stand out formulations, and applications to attract B2B interest. This individual will be passionate about the sensory and scientific attributes of our Ingredients. They will play a key role in driving the acceleration, ideation, design, development, and production of all new products and under the direction of the Chief Innovation and Clinical Officer, you will be responsible for leading the design and commercialization of new products and line extensions ensuring products can be made on Supply Chain Internal (plant) or External (co-manufacturing) resources. You will have strong connections within the co-manufacturing space and a career wanting influence both B2B and D2C with innovative branding, graphic design and consumer testing. This role will require travel and occasional work outside of regular business hours.

Duties and Responsibilities:

As the Head of Product Development, you will be responsible for

• Lead and oversee product development cycle for new and existing ingredients and revisions in the Food, VMS and, Skin care and other developing sectors in health.

• Provides leadership and subject matter expertise, where appropriate, to (external) product development teams to ensure product design is manufacturable at production scale upon transfer while identifying, develop, and/or evaluate comprehensive strategy for assigned brands.

• Ensure effective development phase collaboration with R&D/Operations through final prototype/formulation release on development requirements, process scaling inputs, process equipment/fixture development, work instruction development, method development, analysis tool development, internal and supplier material specification development, release specification development, validation planning and execution, validation reporting, and packaging and labelling development.

• Delivers critical, timely communications to the leadership. Identifies critical dependencies, risks, and contingency plans. Proactively monitors progress, anticipating the effect of dependencies on schedule, cost, etc.

• Oversee direction, planning, and performance of 3rd party Design Transfer teams and associated personnel. Sets and communicates challenging expectations, provides support, leadership, and constructive feedback to staff members in support of meeting expectations while fostering growth and development.

• Communicates and works with Planning to schedule pilot builds and initial production timeline. You have strong business acumen with demonstrated understanding of the financial aspects of product development.

• Effortlessly support Marketing in the development of collateral marketing materials with an eye for branding and D2C awareness with social media savvy.

Other Key Requirements:

• Bachelor of Food Science / Engineering or Design or Marketing

• A minimum of 5 years progressive experience in a product development role in a food manufacturing or retail environment with five years in a leadership role.

• Experience in research and development and product development, specifically in the food industry.

• In-depth knowledge of a broad range of products, ingredients, and processing methods.

• Expertise in sensory evaluation of foods and or cosmetics