Vice President of Operations (Food Testing Laboratory)

Location: Onsite at hirify.global in Kannapolis, in the Charlotte metro area of North Carolina. Regular laboratory presence is essential; limited travel may be required for customers, suppliers, industry events, audits, and partner sites. Relocation support may be available.

Company

hirify.global is an independent third-party testing laboratory serving food, beverage, dietary supplement, ingredient, and consumer-health companies through analytical chemistry, microbiology, method development, and scientific testing services.

What you will do

• Lead end-to-end laboratory operations from sample receiving through testing, analysis, review, and final report release.
• Translate commercial demand into capacity, staffing, scheduling, instrument-utilization, courier, and capital plans.
• Establish operating cadences, service levels, KPIs, escalation rules, and continuous-improvement practices.
• Partner with Quality and R&D to maintain audit readiness, data integrity, CAPA effectiveness, method adherence, and ISO/IEC 17025 compliance.
• Build managers and supervisors through coaching, cross-training, succession planning, and performance management.
• Develop the laboratory capacity roadmap and support method transfers, automation, facilities planning, maintenance, and business continuity.

Requirements

• 10+ years of progressive leadership in an analytical laboratory, testing, inspection, certification, contract research, or other high-throughput regulated technical-services environment.
• Experience owning laboratory operations, budgets, margins, staffing, throughput, turnaround time, quality, and customer metrics.
• Working knowledge of microbiology, analytical chemistry, food nutrient testing, laboratory quality systems, method validation, proficiency testing, CAPA, and audit readiness.
• Experience implementing or optimizing customer portals and LIMS, including translating operational data into KPIs and actions.
• Proven people-leadership, commercial, capacity-planning, and continuous-improvement experience.
• Bachelor’s degree in chemistry, microbiology, food science, engineering, operations, or a related field required; an advanced scientific degree is valued.

Nice to have

• Experience in food, beverage, dietary supplement, or consumer-products testing.
• Strong scientific fluency across method development, instrumentation expansion, and R&D strategy.

Culture & Benefits

• Hands-on leadership environment with regular visibility on the laboratory floor.
• Focus on scientific integrity, confidentiality, quality, safety, accountability, and customer trust.
• Opportunity to scale a growing testing platform while preserving service reliability and technical rigor.
• Limited travel for customer, supplier, industry, audit, and partner-site requirements.