Biomanufacturing Homogenization and Clarification Specialist Future Fields Manufacturing recombinant proteins with whole fruit flies

AgFunder Inc.; Edmonton; Hybrid; CAD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

AgFunder Inc. seeks a hands-on Scale-up Technologist to advance midstream manufacturing from pilot to full production. You will commission new extraction and clarification equipment, run shakedown tests, and own the process optimization to meet a tenfold throughput rise while maintaining quality.

You will develop workflows, write procedures, and train operators for campaigns, ensuring readiness and repeatability in a small team environment with a focus on rapid problem solving.

Qualifications

• Production-scale solid-liquid separation experience.
• Taken a process from pilot to production.
• Commissioning and startup experience.
• Hands-on mechanical ability and fabrication awareness.
• Quantitative process work and data-driven decisions.
• Documentation discipline and SOP writing.

Responsibilities

• Commission new extraction and clarification equipment and start production.
• Design shakedown tests to verify equipment performance.
• Own vendor relationships through startup and leverage application specialists.
• Drive throughput and optimize yield while maintaining product quality.
• Write SOPs, run records, and train operators during campaigns.
• Develop and document repeatable processes for ISO 13485 readiness.

Skills

Mechanical ability

Hands-on

Data-driven

Mass balance

Education

Chemical/Mechanical/Process engineering education

Tools

P&IDs

PLC/SCADA

Job description

We are seeking a hands-on, mechanically-minded Scale-up Technologist to take our midstream manufacturing process from pilot-scale to full production.

Here’s the problem. We rear fruit flies at industrial scale and harvest frozen larval biomass. Midstream processing turns that biomass into a clarified lysate: homogenize, extract the protein, clarify the result. In order to meet our near-term manufacturing demands, our biomass processing technology stack needs to be roughly ten times faster by next year than it is today. Our current scaled-up lab methods will not get us there.

We are in the middle of selecting the industrial equipment that will get us there. Decanter centrifugation, filter pressing, high-shear homogenization, continuous flocculation and depth filtration are all in play. Your job starts where the purchase order ends. You will commission that equipment, debug it against the genuinely difficult material we actually run, climb the rate curve, and build the process and documentation that makes it repeatable.

One thing to understand about the shape of this work: midstream today runs as a small number of large production campaigns rather than continuous daily manufacturing. That means long stretches of building, testing and improving, punctuated by high-stakes runs where everything has to work the first time, from a cold start, with no daily rhythm to fall back on. For the right person, that’s the good version of this job—real time to fix things properly, and a clear moment of truth to fix them for.

This is not a role where you inherit a working line and maintain it. You will inherit machines, a stubborn feedstock, a hard deadline, and a lot of latitude.

Reporting to our VP of Technical Operations, Erik, you’ll work most closely with Brian, our Senior Engineer, and Muhammad, who leads downstream process development. You will train the operators who run the equipment during campaigns, and you’ll be the technical authority they come to when something doesn’t behave. We are a small team by design: there is no maintenance department to escape to, no project manager to write your schedule, and no set of as-built drawings waiting for you. If that sounds like an obstacle, this isn’t your role. If it sounds like freedom, keep reading.

We do not need you to be a biologist. We have those. We need someone who has moved solids and liquids at industrial rates and knows what actually breaks.

This role will own

Commissioning and startup

• Take delivery of new extraction and clarification equipment, run installation and site acceptance, and get it producing on real material—not water trials.
• Design and execute the shakedown testing that tells us whether the equipment does what the vendor said it does, and accrue loudly and early when it doesn’t.
• Own the vendor relationship through startup: hold them to their performance claims, and get their application specialists working your problem.

Rate and yield

• Drive midstream throughput by roughly ten-fold, while holding product quality and protein yield.
• Run structured optimization rather than trial and error: mass balance the process, find where yield and time are actually being lost, and fix things in priority order.
• Own the numbers. Every rate claim we make to a customer traces back to run data you stand behind.

Process, training and reliability

• Design the physical workflow and material flow of the midstream floor: staging, thaw, transfer, waste handling, CIP and turnaround between batches.
• Write the SOPs, run records and troubleshooting guides, then train the operators who execute them during campaigns.
• Make campaigns start cold and go right: readiness checks, dry runs, spares on hand, and the pre-flight discipline that keeps a two-week gap from turning into a lost run.
• Keep equipment running: preventive maintenance, spares strategy, and the hands-on repairs that a small company does itself.

The handoff to purification

• Define and hold the clarified lysate specification our downstream team depends on—turbidity, particulate load, and the other properties that determine whether purification works or fouls.
• Work with downstream process development to characterize how changes upstream of them ripple through filter sizing, resin performance and consumable cost.

Documentation that lasts

• Build process documentation as you go, structured to become the foundation of a formal quality management system rather than something we rebuild later. We’re driving toward ISO 13485, and our Head of Quality will guide you on what that requires.

About you

This role is about industrial reality. The technology is unusual; the unit operations are not. If you have taken a solid-liquid separation or extraction process from pilot to production and made the rate, we want to talk to you.

What we need you to have done before

• Production-scale solid-liquid separation. Decanter or disc-stack centrifugation, filter or belt pressing, flocculation, depth filtration—at real industrial rates, not benchtop.
• Personally taken a process from pilot to production. You’ve been the one on the floor at 2am during a rate trial, not the one who wrote the specification and handed it to a contractor.
• Commissioning and startup. Installation, site acceptance testing, shakedown, and the long unglamorous climb from “it runs” to “it runs at rate, every time.”
• Hands-on mechanical ability. You read P&IDs, you’ll rebuild a pump, you know what to ask a fabrication shop for, and you own tools.
• Quantitative process work. Mass balances, yield accounting, and structured optimization. You reach for data before intuition.
• Comfort without infrastructure. You’ve worked somewhere the resources were thin and you built what you needed.
• Documentation discipline. You write procedures people can actually follow, and you record what happened even when nobody is checking.

Where you might be coming from

Food and agricultural processing, canola or oilseed crush, rendering, brewing and distilling, protein processing, pulp and paper, water and wastewater treatment, mining or minerals processing, cannabis processing, or bioprocessing and biotech manufacturing. Formal training in chemical, mechanical or process engineering, or an equivalent technologist background plus a career of doing it. Anywhere from 5+ years of relevant experience, though we care far more about what you’ve shipped than what’s on your CV.

Bonus points (nice-to-haves)

• High-shear homogenization or mechanical cell disruption at scale.
• Clean-in-place and hygienic or food-grade equipment design.
• Campaign or batch manufacturing experience, where the process has to work correctly from a cold start rather than settling into a daily rhythm.
• Process automation, PLC/SCADA, or instrumentation work—the long-term future of our facility is more automated than its present.
• Experience working inside a formal quality system (ISO 13485, ISO 9001, HACCP, SQF, GMP).
• Protein extraction, precipitation, or filtration chemistry.
• Having been the person everyone finds when something is broken, and liking it.