Applications & product Lead

About CHo Nova

CHoNova is an ETH spin-off specializing in chocolate manufacturing digitalisation. Using proprietary ultrasound-based sensing technology, we enable manufacturers to see what is happening inside the chocolate in real time throughout the production process. By transforming this previously inaccessible data into actionable insights, we help manufacturers reduce costs, increase productivity, and optimize product quality. Our technology is already deployed by multiple leading chocolate brands across five countries, and we're growing our team to accelerate our global scale-up.

The role

You are the bridge between our customers, product and science.

By combining scientific expertise with a deep understanding of customer applications, you help chocolate manufacturers turn product and process data into clear actions that improve quality, efficiency, and productivity. The insights you gain from working with customers directly shape the evolution of our hardware, analytics, and software platform.

You continuously transform expert knowledge into intuitive features, algorithms, and decision-support tools so that our solution delivers greater value and enables customers to interpret and act on their data.

• Enable customers to decide from their data
  . As their trusted scientific partner, you read the story in the production data, interpret deviations, and turn them into practical actions on quality, productivity and efficiency.
• Drive the product's evolution
  . Closest to customer challenges, you set priorities and own the roadmap across hardware, analytics and software — every development tied to a real customer need.
• Turn science into trusted intelligence
  . You build and validate the analytical layer so recommendations are robust, statistically sound, transparent and easy to act on.
• Scale CHoNova's know-how into the product
  . With our R&D partners, you turn expert knowledge into algorithms and decision-support that progressively let customers optimize on their own.

Essential skills

• Strong scientific background (data science, food science, physics, chemical or process engineering, or similar), applied to industrial manufacturing problems.
• Ability to turn complex production and time-series data into clear, actionable insights on process performance and product quality.
• Excellent communication: credible with engineers, production managers and R&D teams, and able to build trusted customer relationships.
• Solid grasp of industrial statistics — SPC, measurement system analysis, repeatability, DoE, confidence intervals.
• Product thinking: prioritize customer needs, define requirements, and work with developers to turn science into scalable features.
• Structured, customer-centric mindset — scientific rigor with pragmatism.
• Fluent written and spoken English.

Desirable

• Experience with manufacturing tech, industrial process monitoring, IoT or sensor-based products.
• ML for industrial use — physics-informed models, Gaussian processes, surrogate models.
• Comfortable across multidisciplinary teams (customers, software, hardware, research partners).
• Track record bringing scientific innovation from research into commercial products.

This is a unique opportunity to be part of the scale-up of an ambitious deep-tech company.

• Real impact. Your work runs on the factory floors of leading chocolate brands from day one.
• You own the client relationship on the technical side and the product roadmap.
• Deep tech, tangible product. Physics, statistics and ML — applied to making better chocolate.