Manager, Food Manufacturing

About this position

UPSIDE Foods is the world's leading cultivated meat company. We’re building a new food system that moves meat forward by rethinking it from the source. By growing real meat from animal cells, we give people the choice to enjoy the meat they love without killing animals. Our work directly addresses the environmental and ethical impacts of the modern food system while supporting global food and nutrition security.

It’s a vision legendary conservationist Jane Goodall called "one of the biggest ideas offering planetary hope."

Based in Emeryville, California, UPSIDE Foods has achieved numerous industry-defining milestones, including making the first cultivated meat to be green-lit by both the FDA and the USDA and sold in the United States. Our team has won numerous industry awards, including TIME World’s Top Green Tech Companies 2026, New York Times’ Good Tech Awards, Fast Co’s Next Big Thing in Tech, and the Best and Brightest Companies to Work For.

To date, UPSIDE Foods has raised more than $600 million in funding from a diverse group of leading U.S. and global investors, including Cargill, Soft Bank, Temasek, Tyson and Whole Foods.

About the role

The Food Manufacturing Manager owns conversion and formulation at EPIC — the point where cultured cells and tissue become ready-to-eat meat products in a USDA-regulated establishment.

This role involves both continued establishment of the process as well as driving efficiency of the existing process. You will be commissioning complex processing equipment alongside fabricators and design engineers, verifying the processes that run on it, and building the operating framework that makes output reliable and repeatable. At the same time you will be running production to schedule, in a facility with a federal inspector on the floor.

The technical bar is high because the product is Ready to Cook. Post-lethality exposure means Salmonella and Listeria control are the governing hazards, and every decision about equipment design, sanitation, line flow, and product handling either supports that or undermines it. You need to understand why, not just follow the SOP.

You will work directly with senior leadership, our integrated supply chain, and every operational function in EPIC. You will also be a principal point of contact in our partnership with USDA-FSIS.

What you'll do

• Lead daily operations of the Food Manufacturing space, including labor and materials planning, run strategy, and throughput against schedule
• Design and lead the production processes required to create Finished Good meat products made of cultured cells and plant ingredients in a regulated facility
• Own manufacturing KPIs — OEE, yield, throughput, first-pass quality, cost per pound — and the operating reviews where they are discussed
• Build run strategies that sequence product, sanitation, and changeover to maximize hygienic run time rather than raw uptime
• Own the manufacturing operating budget and contribute to capital planning for the space

• Interface directly with fabricators and providers of complex industrial meat processing machines on reliability requirements, qualification requirements, hygienic design, and cost
• Evaluate equipment against hygienic design principles (3-A, EHEDG) and reject designs that cannot be sanitized to the standard the process requires
• Partner with Engineering and Facilities on preventive maintenance strategy, spare parts, and reliability-centered improvement
• Operate complex machines and instruments used for the production and storage of harvested meat in a USDA-regulated facility

• Serve as a principal operational contact for in-plant FSIS personnel, accompany inspection walks, and…