Customer Quality Technical Manager
About The Position
The Customer Quality Technical Manager leads customer-facing technical support for Kettle Cuisine, including routine product sampling and coordination of testing, trials, audits, and technical requirements. Based at the Savage Plant in Savage, Maryland, the manager partners with Technical Services and supervises East and West technicians. The role coordinates customer feedback with internal teams and ensures work and documentation are timely, traceable, and appropriately reviewed. The manager is expected to model Kettle Cuisine’s Core Values and safety culture, develop team members, foster accountability and performance, and drive quality assurance and continuous improvement. The role involves planning work, tracking results, resolving issues, and providing after-hours support for critical issues when required.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in food science, Food Technology, Quality, or a related field; equivalent relevant experience may be considered.
- Four or more years of food-manufacturing technical, quality, laboratory, or customer-support experience, with project or team coordination responsibilities.
- Experience coordinating product samples, testing, sensory or production trials, audit support, or technical-document workflows.
- Strong planning, prioritization, documentation, customer-service, and cross-functional communication skills.
- Ability to travel among assigned sites and manage time-sensitive requests.
- Strong project-management, analytical, statistical, and problem-solving skills.
- Self-directed, with high integrity and sound judgment.
- Able to develop strong relationships with internal and external stakeholders, suppliers, and team members.
- Comfortable moving at a fast pace and working in ambiguous environments.
- Enthusiastic about food and able to provide after-hours support for critical issues when required.
- Demonstrated ability to drive continuous improvement and manage to and achieve metrics.
- Willing to address difficult situations directly, with patience and respect.
Nice To Haves
- Familiarity with sample traceability and controlled documentation.
Responsibilities
- Triage customer technical requests and define scope, sample details, owner, deliverable, and due date.
- Coordinate testing, sensory evaluations, trials, audits, and post-launch sample reviews with technicians, site FSQ, and Technical Services.
- Lead East and West technician workloads and standardize sample handling, testing, traceability, and records.
- Coordinate sample collection, analysis, shipping, and documentation for supplier investigations and material changes.
- Route customer and audit documents for review and approval by designated subject-matter owners.
- Track requests and results, and escalate out-of-specification findings, customer risks, and delays.
- Develop individual team members and their careers.
- Plan work, track results, and resolve issues.
- Drive a focus on quality assurance and continuous improvement.
- Manage technician capacity and work quality consistently across East and West coverage.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Manager
