Sr Scientist / Associate Principal

Description/Job Summary:
A Senior/Principal Food Scientist will provide technical support to new or existing customers with growth potential to grow sales of Tate & Lyle ingredients.  This position requires a technical professional with 5 - 10+ years of experience in the food industry with strong knowledge of food systems, ingredient functionality, and processing across a broad range of food applications. Experience with starches and other hydrocolloids is a plus.  The candidate must have strong communication and interpersonal skills and be comfortable working in a fast-paced environment with a large number of customers across a broad range of applications.  Contribution is measured through quality growth in the technical project pipeline and conversion of technical opportunities to sales. Willingness to travel up to 50%.
 

Responsibilities: 
•    Develop close working relationship with the technical community of new customers or under-developed existing customers.  Identify, penetrate and build relationship with key decision makers leading to new opportunities and projects.
•    Work cross functionally within Tate & Lyle to ensure customer performance goals are met.
•    Leads customer projects and provides technical expertise and support to develop high quality, cost effective solutions.
•    Partners with sales teams to build a strong project pipeline by identifying and shaping new opportunities.
•    Capture new technical leads/opportunities to build a strong project pipeline in CRM system.  Independently review projects, growth, and ability to move projects through development stages.
•    Responsible for understanding customer needs and using these insights to support solution design, pipeline development and technical strategies.
•    Understands customer culture, capabilities, structures and processes utilizing these insights to support the development of fit for purpose solutions.
•    Follows and shares market intelligence and industry trends to contribute to solution development.
•    Promote Tate & Lyle’s technical leadership position by presenting new product ideas and technologies to existing and potential customers.
•    Supports customers in using ingredients by leveraging understanding of Tate & Lyle’s ingredients portfolio and their applications.
•    Creates recognition for Tate & Lyle‘s ingredients/technologies by developing and fostering relationships within the industry.
•    Builds a strong and diverse internal network to be able to draw upon the right sources of expertise as required.
Key Competencies:
•    Understands and anticipates customer/market aims, needs, processes and success measures, to better develop and position solutions that have real impact.
o    Senior Level: Assumes primary technical responsibility of customer interactions, draws out issues with timely responses
o    Principal Level: Leads complex technical discussions with customers, mentors others on customer’s needs, develops strategies and influences stakeholders
•    Combines insights on technical expertise, the external environment and our customers’ business with a deep understanding of Tate & Lyle to drive commercially astute business decisions consistent with our strategic objectives.
o    Senior Level: Shares industry and market information back into business, participates in new business technical assessment, determines implicates of solution development and adoption, understand competitive solutions
o    Principal Level: Drives new business technical assessment, combines understanding of T&L and customer value chain to grow the business, demonstrates strong commercial acumen, creates plans and strategies to mitigate risk
•    Thinks creatively, analytically and holistically, employing innate curiosity to explore problems and generate impactful solutions.
o    Senior Level: Effectively questions and explores concepts, represents the voice of the customer, adapts and delivers compelling value propositions
o    Principal Level: Coaches team members and customers, develops and communicates compelling technical insights to secure customer commitment to engage in new solution design
•    Carries out rigorous and high-quality research that elevates Tate & Lyle’s brand as a world-class solutions provider.  
o    Senior Level: Clearly and logically plans projects, follows processes and procedures, supports technical trials, analyzes large amounts of data to define the critical issue