About the Job
🎯 Quality Manager, Quality Engineering and Supplier Quality
🌍 London, N4, expect meaningful travel to Europe/ Asia: this role lives on factory floors as much as on calls.
🏛️ 4 days in our office, 1 day working from home
🤝 Reporting to Insiya (founder, CEO)
💰 £60-70K + equity [based on experience]
About Shellworks
Our vision is a world where the products around you don't damage our environment or our health. At Shellworks we're making that a reality by creating high performance plastic-free materials for everyday products.
Our technology Vivomer makes the impossible possible. It's grown by bacteria using fermentation, creating a material that is stable in use but degrades in every environment. Its breakthrough is being dishwasherable and home compostable at the same time.
We've closed our Series A and are working with some of the world's most recognised brands to replace plastic at volume. We're at an inflection point: scaling from proof-of-concept to mass-market production.
The Role
This is a founding role. You'll be our first hire in quality and sourcing, and you'll set the strategy and own the execution for both.
Vivomer is a new material going into products that have to perform like plastic: on shelf, in transit, in the dishwasher and in the hands of consumers. Our customers are some of the world's biggest brands, and they need to trust that every part we ship meets spec. Getting there means building a global network of manufacturing partners and a quality system that holds up at volume.
We're looking for someone who has done this at a world class manufacturer and wants to build it from scratch. You'll work across our materials, design and manufacturing teams to define how quality works at Shellworks, then make it real on factory floors around the world.
Where the focus is today: Building the partners and the quality system that let Vivomer scale.
Sourcing and supplier quality
Set the sourcing strategy for our global manufacturing partners across plastic molding techniques
Identify, audit and qualify new partners and own the decision on who we work with
Build the supplier quality framework: onboarding, process qualification, scorecards and corrective action
Own cost, capacity and lead time conversations with partners as volumes grow
Quality engineering
Set the strategy for quality engineering at Shellworks, from first principles
Select, roll out and run our quality management system as we scale into production
Define how specifications are set and owned across materials, design and manufacturing
Embed quality in our design cycles so it's considered from the outset
Translate product requirements into test plans
Design in line testing and aesthetic standards with our partners so every part is validated before it ships
Review our checks regularly: where they should be, and where they shouldn't
Build the systems for traceability, incoming inspection, NCRs, root cause analysis and customer complaints
Be the quality voice in front of our brand customers
Beyond
Grow our Quality Engineers as the team expands
Report on quality performance to the leadership team
Who you are
5+ years across manufacturing quality engineering and supplier management, ideally at a world class consumer hardware
You've qualified and managed suppliers across multiple countries and know what good looks like on a factory floor
You've selected and rolled out a QMS, and built quality systems for new product introduction
A materials background: polymers, chemistry or textiles. You understand how a material's behaviour shows up in a finished part
You've worked where design sets the spec and manufacturing proves it, and you know how to make that handoff work
A first principles thinker: you can build a quality system from nothing without importing bureaucracy
Comfortable in front of partners and blue chip customers, in English and ideally another European language
Excited to build the frontier of how materials are made
High tolerance for ambiguity, low tolerance for bureaucracy
What We Offer
🌴 28 days holiday + statutory holidays
👶 12 weeks maternity, 6 weeks paternity, both at full pay
💚 Heka wellbeing allowance - gym, therapy, nutrition, fertility support and more
🩺 Virtual GP with same or next day appointments
🚲 Cycle to work scheme - save up to 42% via salary sacrifice
🍕 Daily catered lunch at the office