Senior Manager, Food Safety and Quality Assurance; FSQA)

Senior Manager, Food Safety and Quality Assurance (FSQA) 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:

UPSIDE Foods is building the food system of the future. We produce real meat from animal cells, and we are moving from pre-commercial production toward commercial scale.

This role owns food safety and quality assurance across our production operations, covering both FDA and USDA production. You will be the person accountable for our FDA Food Safety Plan and USDA HACCP plan, our unique integrated quality management system we continue to build from the ground up.

Extending the above, we are in the process of both SQF and ISO-9000 certifications, which you will lead. This is not maintaining an established system. It is designing one, getting an organization of scientists and operators to adopt it, and taking it through certification, all while ensuring regulatory compliance for Food Safety.

This role is for a “working” manager… being on the floor as much as they are at their desk. Multi-tasking from support of basic and challenging floor issues to creating, reviewing all needed documents and data.

If you want a QA role where the systems are already written and your job is to sustain them, this is not it. If you want to build them, read on.

What you'll do:

• Own the FSP and HACCP end to end - preventive controls, hazard analysis, critical control points, monitoring, verification, and reassessment under 9 CFR 417
• Maintain Sanitation Standard Operating Procedures and the sanitation verification program under 9 CFR 416
• Own the Environmental Monitoring Program (EMP), including zone-based sampling design, trend analysis, and the investigation and corrective action process when results move the wrong direction
• Maintain preventive controls and the food safety plan for FDA-regulated stages of production under 21 CFR 117
• Own allergen control, sanitation chemical management, pest control oversight, and the master sanitation schedule
• Lead recall readiness, including mock recalls, traceability exercises, and hold-and-release procedures

• Serve as the primary point of contact for USDA-FSIS in-plant inspection personnel and manage the daily working relationship on the USDA production floor.
• Maintain the establishment's Grant Of Inspection (GOI) and all conditions attached to it
• Manage regulatory correspondence, including responses to USDA Noncompliance Records, and drive the corrective and preventive actions that close them
• Own label review and FSIS label approval submissions
• Lead FDA Inspections and pre-market consultation activity for new cell lines, media…