Principal Technical Expert, Plant Extract
Job Description
You’re not the person who will settle for just any role. Neither are we. Because we’re out to create Better Care for a Better World, and that takes a certain kind of person and teams who care about making a difference. Here, you’ll bring your professional expertise, talent, and drive to building and managing our portfolio of iconic, ground-breaking brands. In this role, you’ll help us deliver better care for billions of people around the world. It starts with YOU .
Kimberly-Clark is seeking a Principal Technical Expert, Plant Extract to serve as the senior individual contributor responsible for understanding the plant, its chemistry, its variability, and the ways it can be transformed into useful, differentiated ingredients.
This role owns the science and technical learning agenda for the plant extract. You will characterize the raw material, identify active and valuable constituents, develop extraction and fractionation concepts, and define fit-for-purpose ingredient forms for multiple markets.
You will work across research, process development, formulation, analytical, regulatory, quality, commercial, and external technology partners. Your role is to create the technical understanding and ingredient concepts for the business to commercialize.
This is an individual-contributor role with no direct people-management responsibility. The focus is technical depth, creative problem solving, experimental design, scientific judgment, and translating complex plant science into clear ingredient and business opportunities.
In this role, you will:
Build a fundamental understanding of plant composition, seasonal and batch variability, active and inactive constituents, impurities, degradation pathways, and relationships between chemistry, processing, and performance.
Design and execute laboratory and pilot studies to characterize the plant extract and reduce uncertainty around composition, functionality, stability, safety, and value.
Develop and evaluate extraction, fractionation, concentration, stabilization, drying, and other processing concepts that create useful ingredient forms. Provide technical targets and learning priorities to the process engineering lead.
Identify promising compounds, fractions, and extract forms that can create differentiated value target markets.
Define critical material attributes, marker compounds, analytical methods, specifications, and performance requirements for extracts, fractions, concentrates, and other value-added ingredients.
Partner with the Senior Formulation Scientist to translate ingredient hypotheses into application requirements, screening plans, prototypes, and performance testing.
Partner with the Technical Project Leader, Process Engineering to translate research findings into scalable process requirements, mass-balance assumptions, recovery targets, quality limits, and technical risks.
Use analytical data, designed experiments, technical modeling, and scientific literature to develop structure-function and composition-performance relationships.
Evaluate technical, economic, quality, safety, sustainability, and intellectual-property implications of alternative ingredient pathways. Make clear recommendations when a go/no-go decision is required.
Build external capability through universities, contract laboratories, technology suppliers, equipment manufacturers, and other strategic partners.
Support regulatory, product-safety, claims, and intellectual-property assessments for plant-extract-based ingredients and applications.
Document technical findings, learning plans, specifications, study protocols, conclusions, and recommendations in a clear and decision-ready manner.
Provide technical mentoring and thought partnership to scientists, engineers, formulators, and cross-functional teams without formal people-management responsibility.
About Us
Huggies®. Kleenex®. Cottonelle®. Scott®. Kotex®. Poise®. Depend®. Kimberly-Clark…