Manager, Research & Development

Description

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 R&D Manager 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 supplier performance, using metrics to drive accountability and continuous improvement.

• Partner with the Safety team to define appropriate clinical and performance testing strategies to support product claims.
• Collaborate with Regulatory partners to understand upcoming requirements and ensure development plans proactively align to current and future compliance expectations.
• Embed Product Integrity and regulatory considerations early in development to avoid late stage risk and rework.

• Lead, mentor, and develop a team of technical project managers and lab technicians—assigning work, setting priorities, and building strong technical and problem solving capability.
• Coach beyond task execution by developing ownership mindset, decision quality, and systems thinking within the team.
• Own onboarding, development planning, performance feedback, and recognition to build an engaged, high performing R&D team.
• Foster a culture of accountability, curiosity, continuous improvement, and collaboration aligned with Product Integrity and enterprise priorities.