Food Expert

About Mafer

At Mafer we are building an AI data platform for R&D teams in formulation industries: flavors & fragrances, food & beverage, cosmetics, personal care, home care and specialty chemicals. We structure the molecular and formulation data that today lives across instruments, spreadsheets and lab notebooks, and turn it into systems that accelerate analysis, formulation and regulatory work.

We are a small, highly technical team of engineers and scientists, working from our office in Barcelona and backed by tier-1 investors. Everyone here works close to customers: you are either building or selling.

The role

Our models are only as good as the food science behind them. We are hiring a PhD-level food expert who has worked in industry and in the real kitchens of R&D teams: test kitchens, pilot plants and production lines, not only the lab. Someone who has developed products, run trials and taken them from the bench to the plant, and wants to put that knowledge into software that formulators and quality teams use every day.

This is not a pure research role. It is a hybrid of three things: forward deployed (you sit with the client's formulators and quality teams), researcher (you decide what their data means and which models are worth building) and engineer (you ship, in Python, alongside our engineering team). Food is our first priority domain, and this hire owns it.

What you'll do

• Own the science of food inside Mafer: which variables matter, which measurements can be trusted, which relationships a model can learn and which it cannot.
• Deploy with clients: run technical deep-dives with R&D, quality and regulatory teams, read their formulation history and lab data critically, and turn it into well-posed problems.
• Understand a product at the chemical and physical level, not only as a recipe: ingredient functionality, proteins, fats, carbohydrates and emulsifiers, process and reaction chemistry, stability and shelf life, water activity, sensory and nutrition trade-offs such as sodium or sugar reduction, clean-label substitutions.
• Work across categories and scales: bakery, dairy, beverages, savoury, plant-based and nutraceuticals, from the test kitchen to scale-up in the plant.
• Build with the engineers: feature design, evaluation sets, validation against real trials, and the domain modules that encode what you know.
• Write it down: internal notes, and technical notes on our website when the work deserves it.
• What you will not do: publish papers as the main output (the output is a model or a module a client uses), run a wet lab (we work with the client's data and, when needed, their lab), or consult (everything learned deployed becomes product).

What we look for

• A PhD, or equivalent industrial depth, in food science, food chemistry, biochemistry, nutrition science or a close field.
• Hands-on industry experience, and this is essential: you have worked in the R&D function of a food, beverage or nutraceutical company, in its test kitchen or pilot plant, and you have followed a product through scale-up. You know how formulation and quality actually run there. We are not looking for a purely academic profile.
• Quantitative and hands-on with data: comfortable in Python (pandas, scikit-learn or similar), able to read a design of experiments, a sensory panel, a shelf-life study or a nutritional analysis and judge what it supports.
• Rigour and judgement: you can say "this data does not show that", and you can also say "this is good enough to ship".
• Comfortable in front of clients, in Spanish and English, and willing to travel to plants.

Nice to have

• Depth in one or more food categories (dairy, bakery, beverages, savoury, plant-based) at the chemical level: ingredient functionality, process, shelf life.
• Predictive models, chemometrics or QSAR-type approaches applied to food.
• Comfortable with the equipment of a food lab and test kitchen: texture analyser, rheometer and viscometer, water activity and moisture meters, NIR, DSC and colorimeter, and pilot-scale equipment such as mixers, ovens, extruders, homogenisers and spray dryers.
• Familiarity with food regulatory frameworks (EU food law, allergen labelling, novel foods).

What we offer: an early equity package, a €5,000 relocation bonus and help finding housing near the office, 10% of your time on long-term research, and a front-row seat: food becomes a product line, and you own its science.

Hiring process

1. Apply below — we read every application and reply if there's a potential fit.
2. A 30-minute conversation with Fer (CEO) to get to know each other and align expectations.
3. A technical interview with Marc (CTO), around one hour.
4. Two days working on-site with us at the office in Barcelona, on a real Mafer problem: you see how we work and we see how you work.
5. We move fast: we aim to decide within three days of the last conversation.