Senior​/Principal Scientist, Fungal Liquid Fermentation R&D — Own Science at Mission-Dri

Pave Talent is recruiting on behalf of a Chicago-based biotech startup that produces a novel sustainable protein ingredient through proprietary filamentous fungal fermentation. They have a commercial fermentation line running and a fully equipped pilot plant — and they are hiring a Senior or Principal Scientist to be the team's deep scientific authority on fungal physiology and submerged liquid fermentation.

We’re looking for a scientist who:

• Is genuinely curious about what a fungal strain is doing and why, not just how to adjust a parameter to get a number to move.
• Has led their own research initiatives end-to-end — designed the experiment, owned the data, drove the conclusions — not just executed someone else's plan.
• Wants to be on the bench and in the pilot plant, not behind a desk full-time. This is a hands‑on role, and they are proud of that.
• Has thrived (or could thrive) in a smaller, leaner organization where resources are shared, decisions are fast, and their impact is visible.
• May have decided that people management is not what they want — and they want a senior IC role where the science is the job.

The team is engineer-heavy and operationally strong. What they need — and what has been the most difficult hire to make — is someone who brings deep fungal biology to the work. Most of the team thinks in terms of "change this variable, observe that result." The person in this seat investigates why the strain behaves the way it does, designs experiments around that understanding, and drives optimization from first principles.

You will report to the Director of Process and Pilot Engineering and work inside a ~10-person Chicago team. You will not have direct reports at hire, and that structure is planned to hold for at least the next 12 to 24 months. You will, however, have real influence — research associates and junior engineers support experiment execution, so your work operates at a senior scientific level, not in isolation.

The pilot plant runs bioreactors from benchtop through 50‑liter and 500‑liter scale, non‑GMP, BSL‑1 (Biosafety Safety Level
1). One peer operates at the same senior level; the hiring manager described the culture as "not a silo role" — cross‑functional and genuinely collaborative.

• Lead fungal physiology and media optimization initiatives from hypothesis through execution — design the DOE, interpret the data, decide what it means, act on it.
• Develop and optimize submerged fermentation (SmF) strategies for filamentous fungi, with attention to strain behavior, media composition, and feed strategies.
• Use metabolic flux analysis and fermentation modeling to drive techno‑economic feasibility — the goal is hitting commercial cost objectives, not just running a clean process.
• Partner with process engineering on scale‑up and technology transfer from the pilot plant to manufacturing; this is a collaboration, not a handoff.
• Troubleshoot fermentation performance at the hardware and biology level — bioreactor control systems, process deviations, unexpected strain behavior.
• Contribute to cross‑functional alignment with R&D and downstream processing (DSP) teams.

The hiring manager said it directly: "If the person is expecting to come in and sit at a desk and plan and order people around, that's probably not going to fly." The bench split is approximately 50/50 initially — hands‑on pilot plant work alongside experiment planning and data analysis — and that is a feature, not a workaround. The mission is real and the platform is novel, but this is still a startup.

Resources are lean, decisions happen fast, and everyone, including the most senior scientists, rolls up their sleeves.

This is also a role where the scientific problem is genuinely unsolved. The process is mature enough to run commercially. The challenge is to go deeper — to find optimization levers the team has not yet pulled, to understand the organism well enough to unlock meaningful cost reductions. That is an unusual thing to offer a Senior Scientist: a real biological puzzle with commercial stakes attached.

• PhD in fungal biology, microbiology, bioprocess engineering, or a closely related field (MS considered with 10+ years of…