Procurement and Inventory Associate

About us

Vow is a food company - a very different one. We’re creating real meat products from animal cells instead of the animal itself.

We’re bringing together cutting-edge innovations in science, engineering, culinary and design to make sustainable food that’s both irresistible and available to billions of people worldwide.

The role:
We’re looking for someone who’s passionate, technically-minded, and data savvy to join our “Foundry Operations” team, a diverse team of scientists, engineers, and operators focused on improving every aspect of our early manufacturing and R&D efforts. This interdisciplinary team supports, improves, and maintains the momentum of our incredible spaces, tools, data and experiments.

As our Procurement and Inventory Associate, you’ll design and execute on our procurement process from start to finish. This ranges from setting up critical infrastructure and systems, finding ways to identify procurement needs, executing on orders and supporting the delivery and storage of these items in our warehouse and inventory systems. We’ll also look to you to identify and proactively address other R&D challenges in collaboration with others on our Foundry Operations team.

You will be responsible for ensuring our production line and R&D spaces can continuously operate, a critical part of our overall path towards feeding billions of people with sustainable, delicious food

If you’re a generalist with a technical side and are eager for the opportunity to create something that’s going to scale immensely and have a huge impact on the production of sustainable food, then this role is for you.

You have:

- 1-2 years of relevant lab and / or general operations experience.
- Strong communication skills and a willingness to challenge and negotiate.
- Experience with collaborating and negotiating with suppliers of any kind (bonus if you have experience with suppliers in the biotech or pharma industries)
- Confidence in using data to create dashboards, reports, forecasting models, etc.
- First principles mindset and ability to challenge ways of operating
- Strong collaboration and interpersonal capabilities
- An innate drive to organise things - you're very detail oriented and like everything in its place
- A high ownership mentality. This area of the business will become yours to build. You like to get things done and have a strong bias to action
- A keen interest in sustainability, science and food
- ** Bonus**: Experience at another hyper-growth startup

You will:

- Conduct procurement and inventory management duties for our manufacturing sites and R&D lab spaces, including day to day purchasing of raw materials and negotiating supply agreements and pricing with vendors
- Ensure our manufacturing inputs meet our required specifications on arrival
- Set up and manage Vow’s early-stage inventory management for our first production facility
- Develop useful dashboards for a wide range of R&D activities using business intelligence tools to surface insights into lab-wide trends, stock usage, and future price negotiations
- Manage our warehouse spaces, including coordinating storage and tracking of all stock items. You’ll also be the point person for receiving and triaging deliveries
- Continuously improve our approach to purchasing, inventory management, and other processes to make our manufacturing and R&D as efficient and impactful as possible
- Engage with the rest of the Foundry Operations team on high priority projects as they arise, ranging from data and forecasting analyses to hands-on projects in the lab
- Assist in laboratory operations tasks to support the smooth running of the lab and manufacturing spaces where required

What success looks like:
In the first month, you’ll ramp up on all things Vow and cultured meat and will start to take ownership of our existing procurement and purchasing processes. You’ll also spend time in our lab and manufacturing facilities learning more about how we work and our company wide objectives. By the end of this month, you’ll be oriented in the team, what we do and how we do it so you can start putting together a clear game plan to scale our procurement, purchasing, and inventory systems as we prepare for a year of massive growth.

Over the next few months, you’ll lead day to day management of all things procurement and purchasing. You’ll negotiate new deals with our suppliers and will create efficient processes internally to help us better forecast and manage our inventory. Over time, you’ll continuously work to automate and improve these processes, success will entail minimising the amount of day to day time you spend on this work so that you can begin to invest your efforts in building out BI and data capabilities for the team.

Vow, more than just a job.

Who we are and why join:

- ** We are building a diverse, mission-driven dream team of “Vowzers.”** Our mission is to make food products for everyone. To do th