Senior Director - Quality, Food Safety & Regulatory

About the role

The Senior Director of Quality, Food Safety & Regulatory leads company-wide quality, food safety, regulatory compliance, and continuous improvement across a multi-site beverage manufacturing network. This role sets standards, strengthens systems, develops site Quality leaders, and serves as a senior technical resource to Operations, R&D, Supply Chain, Engineering, Commercial teams, and executive leadership.

Responsibilities

• Quality & Food Safety Systems: Lead and continuously improve the corporate Quality and Food Safety Management System across manufacturing sites, including HACCP, FSMA, GMP, GFSI/FSSC 22000, sanitation, allergen, environmental monitoring, traceability, and preventive control programs.
• Regulatory & Audit Leadership: Ensure compliance with applicable FDA and other regulatory requirements and lead or support regulatory inspections, certification audits, customer audits, corrective actions, and ongoing compliance initiatives.
• Technical & Processing Oversight: Provide senior technical leadership for beverage processing and packaging, including pasteurization, hot-fill, aseptic, low-acid/acidified products, powders, bag-in-box, sanitation, analytical testing, and microbiological controls.
• Risk & Crisis Management: Lead significant food safety, quality, supplier, customer, product hold, withdrawal, recall, contamination, and manufacturing investigations and ensure effective risk assessment, escalation, containment, and corrective action.
• Quality Governance & Improvement: Own corporate systems for CAPA, deviations, document control, internal audits, management review, validation, verification, change management, root cause analysis, and continuous improvement.
• Supplier & Customer Quality: Oversee supplier quality strategy and provide senior-level support for significant customer quality and food safety matters, using performance trends to drive systemic improvement.
• Data & Performance Management: Establish meaningful quality and food safety KPIs, identify trends across sites, and use data to prioritize risk reduction, resources, and continuous improvement.
• People & Cross-Functional Leadership: Develop and coach Quality leaders and partner with Operations, R&D, Engineering, Supply Chain, Procurement, Sales, and Marketing so quality and regulatory requirements are built into products, processes, equipment, suppliers, and operational changes.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Food Science, Microbiology, Chemistry, Engineering, Quality, or a related technical field preferred; equivalent directly relevant experience may be considered.
• Significant progressive leadership experience in food or beverage Quality, Food Safety, and Regulatory functions, including leadership of Quality teams in manufacturing environments