Biomanufacturing Scale-up Lead

11130 105 Avenue Northwest, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, T5H 0L5
full-time . August 10, 2026

Description

Ready to make a manufacturing process ten times faster — in a year?

Changing the world—one fruit fly at a time.

We've developed a novel insect-based expression platform to enable bio-products across humanity's most critical verticals.

We're unleashing the next biorevolution.

At Future Fields, we are continually learning and evolving. We know we don't have all the answers, but we try to ask all the questions. We believe in "failing forward" and leveraging our mistakes to help us grow. We never want our team to feel constrained by the status quo and we don't judge ideas based on where they come from. We actively work to foster a culture of collaboration, innovation and psychological safety through transparency, structure, and open communication. We know it sounds cliché, but every employee really is a valued and equal member of the Future Fields team.

Come find your purpose with Future Fields.

We are a rapidly growing venture-backed startup (with support from awesome investors including Bee Partners, Y Combinator, BDC Climate Tech, R7 Partners, Toyota Ventures and Amplify Capital). We've even had a shoutout from Ironman himself! Joining our team now means you'll have the opportunity to shape our culture and products, to lead others, and to influence the direction of our company. Perhaps most importantly, you'll be joining a team that is genuinely energized by this work and the meaningful potential of biotech to change the world.

About the role

We are seeking a hands-on, mechanically-minded Scale-up Technologist to take our midstream manufacturing process from pilot-scale to full production.

Here's the problem. We rear fruit flies at industrial scale and harvest frozen larval biomass. Midstream processing turns that biomass into a clarified lysate: homogenize, extract the protein, clarify the result. In order to meet our near-term manufacturing demands, our biomass processing technology stack needs to be roughly ten times faster by next year than it is today. Our current scaled-up lab methods will not get us there.

We are in the middle of selecting the industrial equipment that will get us there. Decanter centrifugation, filter pressing, high-shear homogenization, continuous flocculation and depth filtration are all in play. Your job starts where the purchase order ends. You will commission that equipment, debug it against the genuinely difficult material we actually run, climb the rate curve, and build the process and documentation that makes it repeatable.

One thing to understand about the shape of this work: midstream today runs as a small number of large production campaigns rather than continuous daily manufacturing. That means long stretches of building, testing and improving, punctuated by high-stakes runs where everything has to work the first time, from a cold start, with no daily rhythm to fall back on. For the right person, that's the good version of this job—real time to fix things properly, and a clear moment of truth to fix them for.

This is not a role where you inherit a working line and maintain it. You will inherit machines, a stubborn feedstock, a hard deadline, and a lot of latitude.

Reporting to our VP of Technical Operations, Erik, you'll work most closely with Brian, our Senior Engineer, and Muhammad, who leads downstream process development. You will train the operators who run the equipment during campaigns, and you'll be the technical authority they come to when something doesn't behave. We are a small team by design: there is no maintenance department to escalate to, no project manager to write your schedule, and no set of as-built drawings waiting for you. If that sounds like an obstacle, this isn't your role. If it sounds like freedom, keep reading.

We do not need you to be a biologist. We have those. We need someone who has moved solids and liquids at industrial rates and knows what actually breaks.

This role will own

Commissioning and startup

Take delivery of new extraction and clarification equipment, run installation and site acceptance, and get it producing on real material—not water trials.
Design and execute the shakedown testing that tells us whether the equipment does what the vendor said it does, and escalate loudly and early when it doesn't.
Own the vendor relationship through startup: hold them to their performance claims, and get their application specialists working your problem.

Rate and yield

Drive midstream throughput by roughly ten-fold, while holding product quality and protein yield.
Run structured optimization rather than trial and error: mass balance the process, find where yield and time are actually being lost, and fix things in priority order.
Own the numbers. Every rate claim we make to a customer traces back to run data you stand behind.

Process, training and reliability

Design the physical workflow and material flow of the midstream floor: staging, thaw, transfer, waste handling, CIP and turnaround between batches.
Write the SOPs, run records and troubleshooting guides, then train the operators who execute them during campaigns.
Make campaigns start cold and go right: readiness checks, dry runs, spares on hand, and the pre-flight discipline that keeps a two-week gap from turning into a lost run.
Keep equipment running: preventive maintenance, spares strategy, and the hands-on repairs that a small company does itself.

The handoff to purification

Define and hold the clarified lysate specification our downstream team depends on—turbidity, particulate load, and the other properties that determine whether purification works or fouls.
Work with downstream process development to characterize how changes upstream of them ripple through filter sizing, resin performance and consumable cost.

Documentation that lasts

Build process documentation as you go, structured to become the foundation of a formal quality management system rather than something we rebuild later. We're driving toward ISO 13485, and our Head of Quality will guide you on what that requires.

About you

This role is about industrial reality. The technology is unusual; the unit operations are not. If you have taken a solid-liquid separation or extraction process from pilot to production and made the rate, we want to talk to you.

What we need you to have done before

Production-scale solid-liquid separation. Decanter or disc-stack centrifugation, filter or belt pressing, flocculation, depth filtration—at real industrial rates, not benchtop.
Personally taken a process from pilot to production. You've been the one on the floor at 2am during a rate trial, not the one who wrote the specification and handed it to a contractor.
Commissioning and startup. Installation, site acceptance testing, shakedown, and the long unglamorous climb from "it runs" to "it runs at rate, every time."
Hands-on mechanical ability. You read P&IDs, you'll rebuild a pump, you know what to ask a fabrication shop for, and you own tools.
Quantitative process work. Mass balances, yield accounting, and structured optimization. You reach for data before intuition.
Comfort without infrastructure. You've worked somewhere the resources were thin and you built what you needed.
Documentation discipline. You write procedures people can actually follow, and you record what happened even when nobody is checking.

Where you might be coming from

Food and agricultural processing, canola or oilseed crush, rendering, brewing and distilling, protein processing, pulp and paper, water and wastewater treatment, mining or minerals processing, cannabis processing, or bioprocessing and biotech manufacturing. Formal training in chemical, mechanical or process engineering, or an equivalent technologist background plus a career of doing it. Anywhere from 5+ years of relevant experience, though we care far more about what you've shipped than what's on your CV.

Bonus points (nice-to-haves)

High-shear homogenization or mechanical cell disruption at scale.
Clean-in-place and hygienic or food-grade equipment design.
Campaign or batch manufacturing experience, where the process has to work correctly from a cold start rather than settling into a daily rhythm.
Process automation, PLC/SCADA, or instrumentation work—the long-term future of our facility is more automated than its present.
Experience working inside a formal quality system (ISO 13485, ISO 9001, HACCP, SQF, GMP).
Protein extraction, precipitation, or filtration chemistry.
Having been the person everyone finds when something is broken, and liking it.

Your future (with Future Fields)

This roadmap outlines the impact you'll make as you grow with us. We'll use this as a guide for your first year, knowing that in a fast-paced environment, we'll adapt and evolve these goals together.

Within 1 month, you will:

Develop a working understanding of our technology, terminology and end-to-end operating process, from strain development and insect rearing through midstream processing, purification, testing and customer delivery.
Learn the current midstream process by running it yourself alongside the team, and form your own view of where the real constraints are rather than inheriting ours.
Review the equipment selections in progress or already made, the vendor trial data behind them, and give the VP of Technical Operations a frank assessment of the risks you see. We want to hear it early, and we want to hear it even if it's unwelcome.
Build working relationships across upstream processing, downstream processing, quality and facilities, and meet the operators you'll be training.

Within 3 months, you will:

Own commissioning of the new midstream equipment: installation, site acceptance and first runs on real biomass, with documented performance against what the vendor promised.
Establish a reliable baseline of midstream performance, with a defensible measurement of throughput, protein yield and clarified lysate quality that everyone in the company trusts and uses.
Have a rate improvement plan with a ranked list of constraints, the experiments or modifications that address each one, and honest estimates of what each is worth.
Have first-draft SOPs and run records in place for the new process.

Within 6 months, you will:

Have midstream throughput substantially improved over today's baseline and on a credible trajectory toward the ten-fold target, with the remaining gap understood and planned for rather than hoped about.
Run a large campaign end to end: material staged, process executed, turnaround and cleaning completed, waste handled, data captured.
Have a defined and enforced clarified lysate specification, with downstream performance characterized against it, so a change in midstream no longer produces a surprise in purification.
Have trained our midstream operators to run the new equipment to procedure, so campaign execution doesn't depend on you standing at every station.

Within 12 months, you will:

Have delivered roughly ten-fold midstream throughput, demonstrated across multiple production campaigns—repeatable, not a best day.
Have delivered on our contracted volumes on time, which is ultimately the only outcome that matters.
Have meaningfully reduced the labour hours required per kilogram of biomass processed, and have a clear point of view on which parts of the process should be automated next.
Have a fully documented process—SOPs, CIP and maintenance procedures, run records, troubleshooting guides—structured well enough to serve as a foundation for our quality management system.
Be the person the company relies on for midstream manufacturing, with the credibility that comes from having made a hard number real.

About our team

Our story and approach to science are anything but conventional. Matt (co-founder/CEO) was a touring punk rock musician who dropped out of University before returning to complete his PhD in cell biology. Jalene (co-founder/COO) is a social researcher by training, previously working on issues from the right to affordable housing to harm reduction. The spark of an idea for our technology came while waiting in line for tiny, Canadian donuts. Our broader team of scientists, engineers, circus performers, restaurateurs, dancers, music aficionados, kid parents, pet parents, cyclists, and artists hail from every corner of the world - from small town Alberta to Poland, India, Vietnam and Pakistan. We credit our diverse team and experiences as the key to our success - and we encourage candidates of all identities and backgrounds to apply.

FAQs

Where is Future Fields located?

Our headquarters and production facility are located in downtown Edmonton, Alberta, in a renovated historic warehouse. From the exposed brick to our summer patio - it's not your average lab space. It is central, close to transit and bike lanes, and walking distance to some of the city's best coffee shops, restaurants and Edmonton's incredible river valley.

I don't live in Edmonton. Why would I want to relocate there?

Because it's great! Edmonton is a young, vibrant city that punches way above its weight. We are one of Canada's sunniest cities and offer an unmatched quality of life with a low cost of living. We're home to North America's largest urban parkland (the River Valley is a playground for cyclists and runners), a festival scene that runs year-round, a rapidly growing tech and biotech ecosystem, and we're exploding with award-winning independent restaurants. It's a place where you can build a career and a life - without the big-city price tag.

Is this role onsite?

Yes. This job happens on a manufacturing floor, with your hands on the equipment. This role is fully onsite in Edmonton.

I don't have a biotech background. Should I apply?

Yes. Some of the best people for this job have never worked in biotech. If you've scaled up an industrial process that separates solids from liquids, you already know most of what matters here, and we'll teach you the biology.

Any other perks?

Many! Some include: comprehensive health, dental and vision benefits; flexible paid time off policy; and the office is always stocked with snacks and all the coffee you can drink.

Will I like working for a startup?

Great question. Startup life is definitely not for everyone. We move quickly. Projects and priorities shift fast. There is a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty at times and we're not immune to the growing pains of a rapidly scaling startup. The risk is high, but so is the reward. We promise you will never get bored. You will have fun and learn a lot. You will grow personally and professionally in ways you never imagined (alongside our company). You will be part of something much bigger than yourself and contribute directly to the mission of a team who cares deeply about changing the world for the better. Oh, and equity!

Sound like something you are interested in? Here are the next steps:

Apply online using our job portal. Application deadline: This role will remain open until a suitable candidate is found.

If it seems like a good fit, next steps will look somewhat like this:

We will contact you for a casual 15-minute video call.
We will set up an interview to dive into your technical skills and motivation.
We'll arrange another interview to figure out how you fit with our team and culture, and better understand your career trajectory.
We will set up a coffee chat with you and a team member. This is your chance to dig in and find out what it's really like to work for Future Fields. This is for you!
We will speak with two of your references to confirm our assumption that you are, in fact, our next great hire.
We offer you a job!

We are committed to building a diverse team and are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We welcome and encourage applications from all qualified individuals, including those with disabilities and candidates from all backgrounds and identities. Please note that for this specific position, we are unable to provide sponsorship for work authorization; candidates must currently be legally authorized to work in Canada.

Know someone who would be a perfect fit? Let them know!