Principal R&D Engineer

Come join a creative team of scientists and engineers at the forefront of beverage innovation. The R&D Process Development Engineering team translates product ideas into robust, scalable, and manufacturable processes that deliver quality, safety, cost, and speed-to-market for Keurig Dr Pepper. This Principal Engineer role will strengthen KDP’s capability to commercialize complex beverage and adjacent food platforms through disciplined scale-up, plant readiness, technical troubleshooting, data-driven decision making, and future-ready ways of working.

The Principal Engineer will lead process development, scale-up strategy, plant trial design, manufacturing readiness, process verification/validation, and technical commercialization support across a diverse innovation and productivity portfolio. This role requires deep hands-on experience with juice, dairy, and complex beverage formulations, including aseptic processing and other thermal processing platforms. The role will partner closely with Product Development, Quality, Packaging, Engineering, Procurement, Supply Chain, manufacturing sites, co-packers, suppliers, and external technical partners to convert product requirements into reliable manufacturing solutions.

This is a senior technical leader role, someone who can manage ambiguity, challenge historical thinking, influence cross-functional partners, mentor others, and create practical solution paths that are technically sound, sustainable, scalable, and business-relevant. This role will also help advance the use of data science, AI-enabled tools, statistical analysis, and process modeling to improve trial design, validation strategy, learning capture, troubleshooting, and first-time-right commercialization.

Responsibilities:

1. Lead technical process development and scale-up for complex R&D projects from bench through pilot, plant trial, validation, and commercialization.
2. Define processing requirements for juice, dairy, and other complex beverage formulations, including process-critical parameters, operating windows, thermal targets, process capability needs, and manufacturing constraints.
3. Provide technical leadership for aseptic processing, hot-fill, pasteurization, HTST/UHT or other thermal processes, batching, blending, deaeration, homogenization, filling, packaging interfaces, sanitation/CIP, and startup readiness.
4. Lead complex test plans, research trials, DOE studies, risk assessments, pilot plant trials, plant trials, process verification/validation activities, and commercialization readiness reviews to generate insight into key design spaces, system limitations, and scale-up opportunities.
5. Apply first principles, experimental data, statistical analysis, data visualization, and light modeling approaches to explain technical phenomena, establish tradeoffs, and influence decisions with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
6. Explore and apply data science, AI-enabled tools, predictive modeling, historical validation data, plant data, and digital knowledge systems to improve technical learning, process decisions, troubleshooting, and future commercialization effectiveness.
7. Partner with Product Development to translate formulation intent into scalable process designs that protect flavor, color, texture, stability, food safety, and finished product quality.
8. Support manufacturing plants and co-packers through capability assessments, process fit evaluations, gap assessments, startup support, troubleshooting, corrective actions, and qualification recommendations.
9. Create clear technical documentation including process flow diagrams, manufacturing instructions, trial protocols, validation summaries, technical reports, presentations, standards, and lessons-learned documentation.
10. Lead root cause analysis for process-related quality, stability, throughput, yield, sanitation, or manufacturing performance issues and recommend practical corrective and preventive actions.
11. Collaborate with Procurement, suppliers, and external partners to assess ingredient/process impacts, alternative materials, productivity opportunities, and supplier technical capabilities.
12. Pro-actively identify and implement improvement opportunities within Process Development Engineering and across functions, including process, tools, standards, systems, and ways of working.
13. Build strong relationships with internal and external partners while demonstrating KDP values, ownership, collaboration, resilience, and a strong technical voice.
14. Act as an