Manager, Research & Development

Manager, Research & Development

At Victoria's Secret & Co, you'll join a world-leading specialty retail brand recognized globally for innovation and excellence in lingerie and fashion. You'll work alongside industry leaders to set the standard for what a retail brand can achieve, placing customers at the center of everything we do to create products and experiences that bring them joy.

We believe everyone deserves a place where they truly belong. We celebrate individuality and know that your passion, experience, and unique perspective strengthen our team and business. Here, you'll be empowered to perform, grow, and engage through unmatched opportunities to develop your skills, gain real-world experience, and learn from the best in the business.

Your Role

The R&D Manager is a critical technical and people leader responsible for translating innovation briefs and market trends into robust, scalable, and compliant product formulations. This role leads formulation development across the full product lifecycle—ideation through commercialization—while building strong cross functional partnerships, developing team capability, and enabling informed technical decisions that support VS&Co Beauty's path to potential, innovation agenda, and global growth.

The ideal candidate is a strategic, hands on leader with deep formulation expertise, strong systems thinking, and the ability to balance creativity with disciplined execution. This role serves as a trusted technical partner to Product Development, Packaging, Safety, Regulatory, and external suppliers—ensuring products are technically sound, execution ready, and aligned with enterprise priorities.

Your Impact

Formulation Leadership & Product Development
• Lead the development of innovative, high performance formulations aligned with briefs, consumer insights, market trends, and regulatory requirements, in partnership with the PFD team.
• Own formulation strategy and technical decision making from concept through pilot, scale up, and commercialization.
• Anticipate technical, stability, compatibility, and scalability risks early in development and proactively define mitigation strategies to protect timelines and launch readiness.

Lifecycle & Cross Functional Execution
• Manage product deliverables across all phases of development, ensuring clear ownership, disciplined milestones, and effective cross functional handoffs.
• Partner closely with Packaging Development to ensure formula package synergy, lead compatibility troubleshooting, drive root cause analysis, and implement sustainable solutions.
• Strengthen collaboration across R&D, Packaging, Safety, Regulatory, Quality, Supply Chain, and contract fillers to improve ways of working and reduce rework.

Decision Enablement & Technical Insight
• Synthesize formulation data, stability results, and development learnings into concise, actionable insights, options, and recommendations for cross functional and leadership stakeholders.
• Clearly communicate risks, assumptions, trade offs, and mitigation paths to support informed and timely decisions.
• Elevate technical issues appropriately, balancing urgency, business impact, and solution oriented thinking.

Stability, Systems & Process Excellence
• Oversee internal and external stability testing programs; assess results, troubleshoot failures, and ensure formulas are robust and commercially ready.
• Ensure accurate execution of systems workflows with strong documentation discipline, data integrity, and downstream readiness.
• Identify and lead continuous improvement opportunities within R&D workflows, systems, and documentation to improve first pass success, reduce cycle time, and enable scalable execution.

Supplier & External Partnership Leadership
• Lead the sourcing and evaluation of new raw materials, actives, and technologies in collaboration with contract fillers and suppliers.
• Translate supplier capabilities and external technical insights into development strategies that support innovation, performance, and long term scalability.
• Ensure seamless transfer of formulas, specifications, and expectations to external manufacturing partners.
• Track and assess…