Description Position at Pilgrim's
R&D Director of Product Development
Purpose and Scope/General Summary: JBS & Pilgrims Prepared Foods is seeking an accomplished R&D Director, Product Development to strengthen business and commercialization outcomes across JBS and Pilgrim's. This enterprise leader will translate growth, renovation, productivity, quality, and customer priorities into technically sound, manufacturable, financially viable products and processes. The role combines hands-on product-development expertise, portfolio leadership, cross-functional influence, and people development. This person will deliver stronger growth, margin, and commercialization outcomes by leading enterprise product-development execution, applying deep technical judgment, and building practical, shared ways of working across JBS and Pilgrim's.
Responsibilities:
Business and Commercialization Leadership
- Lead product-development execution across innovation, renovation, productivity, quality-improvement, and customer-driven portfolios in retail and foodservice.
- Align technical priorities, resources, milestones, and trade-offs to revenue growth, margin, customer need, risk, urgency, and probability of successful execution.
- Partner with Operations, FSQA, Regulatory, Sensory, Culinary, Packaging, Category Management, Procurement, Marketing, Sales, Finance, Supply Chain, and customers to deliver integrated solutions.
- Ensure manufacturing readiness, effective knowledge transfer to plants, and disciplined post-launch review and optimization.
Technical Product Development Leadership
- Serve as a hands-on thought partner for high-value, novel, high-risk, or technically complex programs.
- Guide formulation, ingredient functionality, processing, sensory quality, shelf life, specifications, scale-up, troubleshooting, and optimization.
- Ensure technical plans use clear design criteria, fit-for-purpose experimentation, credible data, explicit risk, and evidence-based recommendations.
- Use suppliers, co-manufacturers, universities, and other external partners to accelerate learning or reduce risk.
Enterprise Practices and Capability
- Create practical product-development standards, technical deliverables, review points, templates, and decision criteria scaled to project risk and complexity.
- Lead product design, trial readiness, commercialization readiness, and post-launch learning reviews that improve speed, decision quality, and first-time-right execution.
- Partner with Stage Gate and Project Management leaders so governance clarifies decisions, ownership, risk, and timing without replacing technical judgment.
- Coach product-development leaders and professionals, strengthen capability expectations by level, and build a culture of ownership, simplicity, disciplined curiosity, constructive challenge, and learning.
Performance, Digital, and AI Enablement
- Use focused business and technical measures, including value delivery, launch timing reliability, technical readiness, rework, and post-launch performance, to improve the system.
- Advance trusted product, formulation, process, sensory, and project data so teams can find and reuse knowledge.
- Champion practical AI, analytics, formulation, specification, product-lifecycle, and project tools that reduce cycle time, improve decisions, and scale successful use cases.
Other duties as assigned
Qualifications:
- Bachelor's degree in Food Science, Meat Science, Poultry Science, Chemical Engineering, or a related technical field; advanced degree preferred.
- 12+ years of product development and commercialization experience, including 5+ years of leadership responsibility.
- Proven track record of bringing products from concept through commercialization, manufacturing, and post-launch optimization.
- Deep expertise in formulation, ingredient functionality, processing, scale-up, sensory quality, shelf-life management, and troubleshooting manufacturing challenges.
- Experience driving improvements in product development processes, experimentation, technical reviews, and commercialization practices.
- Demonstrated ability to influence cross-functional teams and deliver business results across multiple locations and business units.
- Strong executive communication skills with the ability to simplify complex issues, provide recommendations, and explain risks and trade-offs.
- Ability to conduct sensory evaluations of meat and poultry products, including tasting for flavor, texture, and overall quality.
- Working knowledge of Stage Gate processes, portfolio management, statistical analysis, root cause analysis, process capability, and risk assessment.
- Experience in meat, poultry, prepared foods, retail/foodservice product development, and leveraging digital tools such as PLM, analytics, AI, and project management systems
- Travel up to 20% of the time.
- Can perform the functions of the job with or without a reasonable accommodation
- As a salaried position with the company, you may be required to travel at some point to other facilities, to attend Company events, or as a representative of the Company in other situations. Unless otherwise specified in this posting, the amount of travel may vary and the most qualified candidate must be willing and able to travel as business needs dictate.
The applicant who fills this position will be eligible for the following compensation and benefits:
- Benefits: Vision, Medical, and Dental coverage begin after 60 days of employment;
- Paid Time Off: sick leave, vacation, and 6 company observed holidays;
- 401(k): company match begins after the first year of service and follows the company vesting schedule;
- Base salary range of $149,000-$180,000
- Incentive Pay: This position is eligible to participate in the Company's annual bonus plan, the amount of bonus varies and is subject to the standard terms and conditions of the incentive program; and
- Career Development: Our company is dedicated to supporting professional growth by offering continuous learning opportunities and a focus on career growth through various learning and development programs.
The posted salary range represents the Company's good faith estimate of the compensation that the Company reasonably expects to pay for this role at the time of posting. Actual compensation will be determined based on factors including, but not limited to, relevant experience, skills, qualifications, tenure, internal equity, market data, and may vary accordingly.
This position does not have an application deadline. We will continue to recruit until the position has been filled.
