Head Roaster

Fieldwork Coffee

We're looking for an experienced coffee roaster to join our team as Head Roaster in a full-time, permanent position. Your role in our small team will be crucial to our success; pushing forward the quality of our roasted coffee, and leading the team that supports it.
- Make a meaningful and informed contribution to our green coffee buying decisions
- Be part of a small and passionate team of coffee-obsessives
- Work from our newly-built Fitzroy North roastery and coffee shop

The Role

We’re looking for an experienced coffee roaster to join our team as Head Roaster in a full-time, permanent position. Your role in our small team will be crucial to our success; pushing forward the quality of our roasted coffee, and leading the team that supports it. Beyond sample roasting, production roasting, and quality control, you’ll be responsible for managing the roastery’s back-of-house operations. The role also involves a lot of cleaning, pre-weighing, maintenance, record keeping, and organisation.

Who’s The Role For?

Key Responsibilities

Sourcing
- Making a meaningful and informed contribution to our green coffee buying decisions
- Liaising with supply chain partners about samples, coffee information, arrival updates
- Preparing pre-ship, offer, and arrival green coffee samples for evaluation
- Logging green coffee samples and associated data in Cropster
- Collating sourcing information for our annual Transparency Report

Roasting
- Roasting our coffee range to ever-increasing levels of quality and consistency
- Overseeing the on-time, accurate, and quality-driven running of our production days
- Ensuring our roastery workflows are safe, efficient, and human-centric
- Establishing, tracking and improving roast goal success rates in Cropster
- Staying up-to-date with developments in modern roasting theories and technologies

Quality
- Setting up and leading cupping and espresso quality control sessions
- Utilising sensory analysis, with key roast metrics and data, to understand roast quality
- Identifying, recording, and actioning roast profile changes required to improve quality

Operations
- Conducting weekly and ad hoc ordering of green coffee, packaging, and roastery supplies
- Managing our inventory of green coffee and staged batches across storage locations
- General cleaning of roastery, green store, cupping space, and toilets

Maintenance
- Conducting weekly roaster preventative maintenance and deep cleaning
- Troubleshooting and solving mechanical or technical problems in the roastery
- Maintaining an inventory of spare parts, required tools, and maintenance supplies

Leadership
- Creating a positive, encouraging, and supportive work environment
- Actively leading, training, supervising, and supporting other roastery staff
- Actively connecting with coffee shop staff to share information about our coffees
- Working with the director to identify and deploy staff training opportunities

Everyone Contributes To
- Identifying and connecting with potential wholesale sales opportunities
- Providing customer support to our wholesale, webshop, and co-roasting customers
- Picking, packing, and shipping wholesale orders
- Packing and shipping webshop orders using Shopify
- Delivering wholesale orders to customers in Melbourne and Geelong
- Staying informed and communicating with colleagues in Slack
- Pitching in and helping colleagues out when required

Role Requirements
- Two years experience in a similar role, covering sourcing, roasting, and maintenance
- Extensive experience with Probat shop roasters, or similar roasting formats
- An active and connected interest in modern coffee roasting, locally and around the world
- Excellent time-management, leadership, and communication skills
- A bias-towards-action approach
- A full driver’s license with no restrictions or demerits
- Competency with Google Suite: Mail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Calendar

Compensation
- $70,000 - $80,000 per year, dependent on experience
- Statutory superannuation and holidays
- Work laptop provided

Applications
- Applications close March 1st, 2024