Senior / Principal Scientist - Ingredient Development

About us

Kingdom is the world’s first AI-native ingredients company. We create Superculture® ingredients from natural microbes to improve the health of pets and people. Brands use our ingredients because they deliver industry-leading efficacy and health benefits that consumers notice in just days.

AI powers how we develop, clinically validate, and manufacture our ingredients, enabling us to bring them to market faster and at lower cost. Developing a new ingredient has traditionally taken more than five years and tens of millions of dollars. Our small team is launching one clinically validated ingredient a year, at a small fraction of that cost.

Kingdom has clear product-market fit, with accelerating customer demand:

• After just a year in market, our ingredients are already in dozens of products from household pet brands. And 95% of our first-time customers are launching additional products with us.

• Each ingredient improves our discovery platform, clinical engine, and manufacturing expertise, so we can develop the next one faster and at lower cost.

• We’ve raised nearly $40M from leading investors to bring our ingredients to more brands and markets around the world.

Our number one priority is turning proven ingredient performance and early commercial traction into repeatable growth across customers and markets. We’re looking for highly resourceful, high-throughput individuals who solve problems from first principles, make sound decisions, communicate clearly, and move quickly.

More than $1.2 trillion is spent every year on pet and human health products. Our ambition is to make clinical efficacy the standard across that entire market.

All full-time roles are in person at our Brooklyn Navy Yard headquarters and lab.

About the role

Kingdom’s next stage of growth depends on bringing more Superculture® ingredients into customers’ products. That requires rigorous evidence demonstrating how our ingredients work, perform in various formulations, and withstand manufacturing and storage. We’re building a dedicated scientific function to lead that work and help customers evaluate and adopt our ingredients.

As Senior or Principal Scientist, Ingredient Development, you will lead our in vitro validation function, combining scientific direction with hands-on execution. You’ll determine which questions matter most, design the experiments that answer them, and use the results to guide development. Your work will connect scientific judgment with practical decisions about how ingredients are developed and used.

You’ll work closely with bioprocess, clinical development, regulatory, and commercial colleagues to connect laboratory findings with customer needs. This means helping colleagues and customers understand what the evidence establishes, where uncertainty remains, and what further work would support adoption. Scientific leadership and collaboration will be central to your impact.

This is an opportunity to shape how Kingdom develops ingredients across a growing portfolio. Success means rigorous, timely validation and clear evidence that supports customer evaluation. You’ll expand your leadership through scientific direction and mentoring, while remaining involved in the experimental work that moves ingredients forward.

If you join, you will:

• Lead in vitro validation across projects

  • Own the in vitro validation strategy across ingredient programs, identify evidence gaps, and design and execute studies of efficacy, safety, mechanisms of action, stability, shelf-life, and analytical characterization, including comparisons with other ingredients.

  • Plan and coordinate external testing with contract research organizations (CROs), defining study designs, deliverables, and timelines. Assess data quality and interpret findings to guide ingredient development.

  • Lead formulation development, working with the bioprocess team to account for manufacturing processes and requirements as production scales.

• Connect technical development to customer needs

  • Maintain a shared database of ingredient evidence, contributions across teams, and remaining gaps. Translate findings into technical materials, formulation guidance, and safety and stability documentation, coordinating scientific, safety, and regulatory review.

  • Help the commercial team explain ingredient efficacy, safety, and mechanisms of action to customers, engaging independently as experience allows. Together, turn customer feedback into development priorities, distinguishing immediate adoption barriers from longer-term needs.

  • Own responses to in vitro and formulation questions, setting realistic timelines and following through.

We’re looking for you if you have:

• A PhD in a relevant life sciences field plus 3 - 4 years of work experience; more experienced candidates are encouraged to apply

• Rigorous experimental design, quantitative analysis, and interpretation of efficacy and mechanisms-of-action studies

• Hands-on experience developing, validating, and troubleshooting cell-based models and assays, with reproducible, transferable protocols

• The ability to synthesize evidence clearly into reports and datasets, including limitations and needs for further testing or specialist review

• Scientific leadership: the ability to set direction, make decisions, and build a function while remaining accountable for its work

• Structured planning and prioritization across projects: identifying evidence gaps and dependencies, allocating effort, and resolving blockers with relevant stakeholders

• Scientific judgment under ambiguity: choosing informative experiments, balancing depth of investigation with urgency, and recognizing when specialist input is needed

• Clear communication and collaboration: explaining evidence, translating requests into scientific questions, and agreeing on realistic commitments

• Practical experience using AI to support scientific work, with independent verification of outputs

• Experience working with CROs: defining study objectives and deliverables, assessing proposed methods, and critically reviewing results

• Intellectual curiosity and enjoyment of learning unfamiliar biology

Working with us

Kingdom is based in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, with our full team working out of a 9,000 sq-ft headquarters and lab space. We operate in a high-trust, high-autonomy environment, which requires that everyone uphold our core values:

• Solve from first principles. We have a deep-seated curiosity about the most important problems facing the business. Our nature is to dig deeply into their details, question assumptions, understand the smallest details, and drive towards the best possible solution using these insights. This makes us very effective in crafting new solutions and operating in ambiguous circumstances.

• Collaborate with kindness. We are very low ego, and treat each other with respect, compassion, and humility. We hold one another to high standards, but do so while being deeply committed to each other's wellbeing. We invest in each other's growth, and are willing to engage in difficult conversations and deliver direct, constructive feedback when necessary.

• Be resourceful and resilient. We figure out how to make things work, and how to accomplish our goals regardless of what stands in the way. We're keen to confront challenges together through proactive planning and scrappy methods. When things go wrong, we learn quickly from our missteps, adapt our approach, and push forward.

We provide competitive compensation with generous equity. Everyone who joins Kingdom will be a major contributor to our success, which we reflect in our approach to ownership and compensation. The cash salary range for this role is $132.5–205K for Senior or Principal Scientist, with the final starting salary being determined by qualifications, experience, skill set, and internal equity. Our salary ranges are based on paying competitively for our company’s size and industry, and are one part of a total compensation package that also includes benefits (more below) and equity (to be discussed more during the interview process).

We also provide a rich benefits package to support our team:

• Fully covered, best-in-class medical, vision, and dental insurance

• Free memberships to One Medical, Teladoc, and Talkspace

• Flexible PTO, in addition to 13 paid company holidays (including a weeklong winter closure from Christmas Eve through New Year's Day)

• 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave, with the option to extend up to 24 weeks total

• 401(k) plan, FSA option, and commuter benefit of your choice

• Fully stocked kitchen with fruits, snacks, coffee, and tea, plus weekly team lunches

Kingdom is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related condition, or any other basis protected by law.