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Salary: GBP 60,000 - 70,000 / annual
Shellworks is scaling production of Vivomer, a breakthrough plastic-free material grown by bacteria via fermentation that is both dishwasherable and home compostable. The company has closed Series A funding and is working with major global brands to replace plastic at volume.
This is a founding role: you will be Shellworks' first quality hire, owning both quality engineering and supplier quality strategy and execution as the company scales from proof-of-concept to mass-market production. You'll report directly to the founder/CEO and work across materials, design, and manufacturing teams to build a global quality system that holds up at volume.
Key responsibilities include:
**Sourcing & Supplier Quality:**
- Set sourcing strategy for global manufacturing partners across plastic molding techniques
- Identify, audit, and qualify new partners; own partner selection decisions
- Build supplier quality framework: onboarding, process qualification, scorecards, corrective action
- Own cost, capacity, and lead-time conversations with partners as volumes grow
**Quality Engineering:**
- Define quality engineering strategy from first principles
- Set and own specifications across materials, design, and manufacturing
- Translate product requirements into test plans
- Design in-line testing and aesthetic standards with partners to validate every part before shipment
- Build systems for traceability, incoming inspection, root cause analysis, and customer complaints
- Serve as quality voice with brand customers
You'll spend 4 days in the London office and 1 day working from home, with meaningful travel to Europe and Asia to work on factory floors. This role requires someone who can build a quality system from scratch without importing unnecessary bureaucracy, and who thrives in a high-ambiguity, fast-moving environment.
**Requirements:**
- 5+ years in manufacturing quality engineering and supplier management, ideally at a world-class consumer hardware company
- Proven experience qualifying and managing suppliers across multiple countries with factory-floor familiarity
- Materials background (polymers, chemistry, or textiles); understanding of how material behavior translates to finished parts
- Experience working where design sets spec and manufacturing proves it; ability to make that handoff work effectively
- First-principles thinker capable of building quality systems from nothing
- Comfortable presenting to partners and blue-chip customers
- Fluent in English; ideally another European language
- High tolerance for ambiguity, low tolerance for bureaucracy
