Director of Agricultural Process Engineering

Sensient • Turlock, CA

9h • $185,000 - $250,000 • Onsite

About The Position

Are you looking for an opportunity to own and transform onion, garlic, and parsley operations from field to finished product? Are you excited to solve real-world challenges, build scalable systems, lead high-performing teams, and grow your technical and leadership impact in a hands-on, collaborative environment?
This is for a leader who spends time in the fields, on the plant floor, and inside the process, translating real-world variability into scalable systems that work. You’ll own day-to-day production execution while architecting the processes, workflows, and infrastructure that will carry this operation forward. This is a rare opportunity to drive operational excellence and apply engineering thinking to agricultural complexity to create durable, repeatable systems in a high-variability environment.

Requirements

• Extensive agricultural or food manufacturing experience (10+ years), ideally in dehydrated ingredients, produce, herbs, or root vegetables.
• Proven success in hands-on, high-variability environments, navigating complexity from raw materials, weather, and seasonal fluctuations.
• Process-engineering mindset, skilled in root cause analysis, designing scalable systems, and eliminating recurring operational issues.
• Deep technical and regulatory knowledge, including dehydration processes, crop variability, agricultural supply chains, and FSMA, HACCP, GMP, and operational food safety.
• Strong educational foundation (Bachelor’s in Engineering, Food Science, or related field; advanced degree a plus) and ability to balance day-to-day execution with long-term process architecture.

Responsibilities

• Own and optimize end-to-end production for onion, garlic, and parsley ingredients—from field intake through cleaning, dehydration, milling, and packaging—turning agricultural variability into scalable, repeatable processes.
• Be hands-on in operations, walking fields, working the plant floor, troubleshooting in real time, and translating real-world constraints into engineered solutions.
• Design and implement systems, workflows, and SOPs that improve throughput, consistency, uptime, and operational excellence, using Lean, Six Sigma, and data-driven approaches.
• Build and lead high-performing teams across production, maintenance, and supply chain, while driving food safety, quality, and compliance to FSMA, HACCP, GMP, OSHA, and environmental standards.
• Collaborate on strategic growth, providing execution-informed input on capacity expansion, capital projects, and long-term process design while optimizing equipment performance and preventive maintenance programs.

Benefits

• The opportunity to build and engineer a future-ready agricultural production operation.
• A leadership role where technical judgment and on-the-ground execution matter more than presentations.
• A fast-moving, entrepreneurial environment with meaningful ownership and impact.
• Competitive compensation, benefits, and long-term growth opportunity.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Number of Employees: 1,001-5,000 employees