Company Background

Humans waste an unthinkable amount of food. In fact, nearly half of all of the food we grow in the U.S. never reaches a plate. It's not just the food that we're wasting—we’re throwing away all of the natural resources that went into growing it, too. At Apeel Sciences, we look to nature to derive sustainable solutions to our global food challenges so we can all eat better and waste less. We're pioneering plant-derived technologies to help fresh food providers improve food quality, reduce waste, and ensure an abundant future for our planet. We are committed to being a technological and environmental trailblazer at the intersection of the agricultural, materials science, chemistry, biotechnology, and engineering industries, and we’re looking for brilliant, passionate problem-solvers to join us.

Company Culture

Apeel is comprised of highly talented, deeply passionate, and strongly tight-knit team members who are excited by the opportunity to challenge the status quo, are obsessed with solving problems, and truly seek to positively change how we feed the world.

Our people are core and absolutely fundamental to our company’s success and continued growth. Look around and what do you see? Team members who are working tirelessly and selflessly—not to serve themselves—but to help the team as a whole strategically, aggressively, and collectively realize a shared mission and vision. If you are ready for an opportunity to jump in, tackle challenges (and opportunities!) head-on, take ownership, and drive meaningful outcomes in a highly collaborative, communicative, and dynamic environment, we would love to connect with you!

About This Role

Our Field Operations are core to our business model and success. We are looking for a strongly technical, proactive, process-, service-, and people-oriented leader to grow, motivate, and oversee operations engineering in the field. You will ensure that our field service offerings provide continuous value to our commercial programs and customer sites by: (1) building out combined in-house and contracted teams of installers to ensure speed and quality with regards to Apeel equipment installations at customer sites; (2) ensuring smooth site turnover to the steady-state teams; (3) establishing a proactive maintenance culture; (4) executing engineering best practices in order to optimize the lifecycle of our assets at customer sites to deliver high industrial performance; (5) working with our field teams and our customers’ teams to optimize produce treatment and packing throughput and efficiency. This position also ensures that the repair and preventative maintenance of the equipment meet the regulatory requirements through maintenance design and execution with the goal of minimal operational interruptions to our customers, and that our Engineering Teams provide the proper operational support through access to appropriate technical subject matter expertise and the execution of projects (e.g., upgrades) to meet the business needs of each of our customer sites.

What You’ll Do

• As a senior leader on the Field Operations team, you will provide leadership and strategic direction for all Operations Engineering (installations, reliability, and maintenance), developing key partnerships with the Field Services unit
• Enable end-to-end continuity and velocity from early equipment design stages and initial equipment installation and commissioning at customer sites through to day-to-day equipment and product application operation while ensuring safety, maintenance, reliability, and continuous improvement of the equipment and our processes at our customers’ sites
• Drive transformation of existing processes to improve overall services, elevating our customer experience, satisfaction, retention, and value
• Establish KPIs that ultimately help to manage and elevate our performance in the field
• Work with internal teams and external vendors to ensure we are meeting the company’s and our customers’ service objectives within set project timelines and response times
• Implement and manage platforms for monitoring and sharing operational performance as well as best practices
• Evolve the operations engineering organization structure to enable rapid and sustained growth of the business

What You’ll Bring

• Bachelor’s degree in a STEM field required
• 10+ years of experience rapidly building, scaling, and leading global, distributed technical field teams
• Previous hands on experience working as a construction, installation, maintenance, service, or field engineer preferred
• Experience in heavy industrial equipment and/or power electronics industries preferred
• Experience working in a multi-national, matrixed organization ideal

• Demonstrated ability to plan, implement, and manage at both strategic and operational levels with a “systems mindset”
• Strong and decisive; can quickly earn the respect of internal customers and all levels of management by demonstrating knowledge and expertise
• Proven ability to prioritize multiple demands and understand when to take necessary risks for appropriate rewards
• Exceptional oral, written, and presentation communication skills
• Customer management skills to build and maintain effective relationships with internal and external partners and customers, resolving customer issues to a high degree of satisfaction
• Total commitment to continuous improvement, driving leaders and team members to adapt and implement critical improvement processes across the enterprise at all levels
• Demonstrated ability to negotiate and manage vendor contracts
• Able to travel domestically and internationally (up to ~ 40%)
• Spanish language proficiency is plus 

Apeel believes that the scale of our impact is determined by the teams that work with us. As such, we seek to build high-performing teams of people from various experiences and backgrounds who can collectively push our company into new realms. We seek a diverse pool of applicants and consider all qualified candidates regardless of race, ancestry, color, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, citizenship, disability, Veteran status, marital status, or any other protected status. If you have a special need or disability that requires accommodation, please let us know.

Please note that Apeel Sciences does not accept unsolicited resumes from recruiters or employment agencies. In the event of a recruiter or agency submitting a resume or candidate without a signed agreement being in place, we explicitly reserve the right to pursue and hire such candidates without any financial obligation to the recruiter or agency. Any unsolicited resumes, including those submitted directly to hiring managers, are deemed to be the property of Apeel Sciences.