Job area: Recherche & Développement
Activity: Custom drying food ingredients
Location: Marcq-en-Barœul, France
Contract type: Permanent Contract
Experience: 3 to 5 years

Contribute to an exciting mission
What will your daily life look like?

As of mid-2022, the R&D Fermentation department will be based at the new Lesaffre International Campus, the “Forum”, a state-of-the-art facility covering 23000m² and bringing together over 700 employees from Lesaffre’s Corporate R&D organization and the various business units of the company.

Within the Fermentation department, the R&D Scientist defines, executes and reports workplans involving strain performance testing and/or fermentation process development. Collaborating with other experts in multi-disciplinary project teams, you will have a key role in bringing new or improved fermentation-based products to market for all the businesses of Lesaffre Group.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Definition of experimental plans and their execution, either individually or leading technicians

• Data processing, critical analysis of results and reporting to various stakeholders

• Tech transfer to pilot-scale and support to factory trials

• Development of new process technologies (hardware, sensors, algorithms, models, scale-down recipes, etc) to meet novel or emerging business needs

• Contribute to continuous improvement of practices and adoption of new techniques

• Contribute to good maintenance of equipment and facilities as well as training of newcomers

• Contribute to identification and development of IP opportunities

Make a personal impact
That makes you the ideal candidate

• Passionate for working at the interface between Biology, Chemistry and Engineering and motivated to see your research in the lab turning into industrial processes and products

• MSc in Biochemical Engineering, Biotechnology or equivalent, having excelled at microbiology and process technology

• Minimally 3 years industrial experience or PhD in relevant field; broad exposure to multiple markets, product types, microorganisms, scales and process regimes is desirable; experience in fields such as probiotics, food fermentation, solid-state processes, hard-to-cultivate microbes, microalgae, crop protection or biopharmaceuticals is a plus

• Solid understanding of physiology and fermentation technology principles, incl. growth kinetics, balances, mass transfer and scale-specific considerations

• Good computational skills and familiarity with DoE, statistics, data management and visualization tools; affinity for programming, bioinformatics, CFD or techno-economic modelling is desirable; experience with high-throughput systems, flow cytometry, microfluidics or multi-omics approaches is a plus

• Good critical thinking skills, acting with rigor and integrity; demonstrated ability to translate research questions into intelligent and pragmatic experimental plans

• Good inter-personal skills; demonstrated ability to work alongside technicians/operators and within multi-disciplinary projects

• Good communication skills, comfortable delivering results to both experts and non-experts; multinational work/life experience is desirable

Let’s take on tomorrow’s challenges together

A key global player in fermentation for more than a century, Lesaffre, with a 2,2 billion euro turnover, and established on all continents, counts 10,700 employees and more than 85 nationalities. On the strength of this experience and diversity, we work with customers, partners and researchers to find ever more relevant answers to the needs of food, health, naturalness and respect for our environment. Thus, every day, we explore and reveal the infinite potential of microorganisms.

To nourish 10 billion people, in a healthy way, in 2050 by making the most of our planet’s resources is a major and unprecedented issue. We believe that fermentation is one of the most promising answers to this challenge.