Microbiology & Food Safety Program Lead

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Job Description:

To ensure microbiology laboratory function operation and full compliance as per company requirement. This position is a combination of a subject matter expertise in Microbiology that requires people leadership and customer facing skills.  The successful candidate and will lead (direct & indirect) the efforts of development, implementation, training, troubleshooting, and

auditing of microbiological methods and best practices; work with customers on their expectations and ensure we are complaint with them; and work with operations to identify trends, implement action plans, oversee appropriate CAPA development driven by data; and instill Food Safety Quality Culture through words and actions. 

Duties include ensuring full compliance of the Baramati plant Main micro laboratory function, which includes ensuring the laboratory safe, accurate, and timely functioning. Hiring, retaining, training and coaching partners. Maintaining compliance through internal audits and ensuring all internal, regulatory and customer’s requirements are fully compliant. Evaluating partner performance, including partner accountability for adherence to microbiology department functions including but not limited to sampling, analysis, ensuring all monitoring plan are met, data / information trending and communication and Proficiency test participation, ISO 17025 or good laboratory practices management compliances.

In addition to microbiology function, this role will provide support and active involvement in leading continuous improvement and expertise related food safety and sanitation related improvement process mainly to Baramati plant and as and when required to other plant of India region. Will be closely collaborating with EQFS SFI microbiologist

What you’ll do:

• Serves as laboratory microbiology leader and technical resource to collaborate with operations leaders on expectations, results interpretation, sampling plans (including customer-specific and regulatory requirements), method use, determining process capabilities/troubleshooting, and projects and programs as required.Coordinate and be the primary contact for external labs.Meet with external customers to explain programs and results.Provide input and work with departments on conducting risk assessments for HACCP and quality of products and processes.Be able to explain programs and requirements for customer and regulatory auditors.

• Lead the microbiology team on microbiology lab management and accreditation requirements.Remove barriers for testing execution and provide direction on methods that should be used.Promote safe working environments for partners. Review and optimize sampling as per risk and review workload of partner.

• The role is responsible for laboratory information system implementation and assuring adherence of partners to use the system effectively.

• Ensure all requirements Good Laboratory Practices and customer testing expectations (ex. ISO17025 or equivalent) are being met.Evaluate CAPAs for thoroughness and effectiveness – within operations, sanitation, as well as within the laboratory. Escalate outages and work with corporate Home Office as necessary to resolve issues.Support all India facilities as needed.

• Develop Food Safety and Quality and Culture - train, coach, evaluate, and reinforce continuous improvement principles with partners as well as personal, people, business, and process leadership.Support all India facilities as needed.

• Work with corporate Food Safety & Microbiology partners or topics of Pathogen Environmental Monitoring expectations, formula evaluation & process food safety, method validations & changes, etc.  Assist with troubleshooting of issues at other plants as needed (may be outside of India).

• Support new projects to assess food safety evaluation along with key stake holders.

• Closely with all plants and support India region Food Safety and Sanitation process by working on development /improvement of systems, training partners, implementing and reviewing Food safety systems. Support in trouble shooting of the process when required to overcome the challenges and applying / implementing lessons learned as applicable.

• Financial - Track and maintain control of department budgets to assure plant goals are met. Plan for capex for laboratory and food safety related.Plan for capex for laboratory and food safety related.

What you need to succeed:

• M. Sc Microbiology
• 10+ years’ experience in Quality Assurance, Food Safety or Production
• Subject-matter expertise
  • Incumbent shall have a sound knowledge of microbiology analysis of food and food products
  • HACCP and Food safety risk assessment preferably in field of microbiology
  • Performance skills (accuracy with detail, planning and organizing, efficiency, business acumen)
  • Good technical communication skills explaining programs and policies to internal and external people and bodies
  • Good documentation skills
  • Comfortable in a food manufacturing environment as well as in a laboratory
• Leadership
  • Leadership skills in managing and developing team
  • Interpersonal skills (relationship building, teamwork, interpersonal insight, conflict resolution, customer orientation)
  • Communication (verbal communication, persuasive impact, listening, written communication) – English preferred
  • Judgment and thinking (strategic thinking, original thinking, judgment and decision making, problem solving, awareness)
  • Personal characteristics (motivation/commitment, flexibility, assertiveness, development orientation, results orientation resilience, quality orientation)
• Excellent interpersonal and problem-solving abilities
• Comfortable escalating situations to leadership as needed
• Ability to make good business decisions quickly
• Desire to grow and take on new challenges and opportunities
• Ability to travel up to 5-10%