{"id":3645306,"url":"https://alion.io/job/kingdom-senior-principal-scientist-ingredient-development","title":"Senior / Principal Scientist, Ingredient Development","company":{"id":2784,"name":"Kingdom","domain":"kingdomsuperculture.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/kingdom","size_band":"11-50","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":null},"role":"Science & Research","role_family":"Science & Research","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Brooklyn, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":132500,"max":205000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":205000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":3,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-02T21:48:55Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-02","last_verified_at":"2026-11-12T08:50:58Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":9,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":9},"description":"About us\nKingdom is the world’s first AI-native ingredients company. We create Superculture® ingredients from natural microbes to improve the health of pets and people. Brands use our ingredients because they deliver industry-leading efficacy and health benefits that consumers notice in just days.\nAI powers how we develop, clinically validate, and manufacture our ingredients, enabling us to bring them to market faster and at lower cost. Developing a new ingredient has traditionally taken more than five years and tens of millions of dollars. Our small team is launching one clinically validated ingredient a year, at a small fraction of that cost.\nKingdom has clear product-market fit, with accelerating customer demand:\nAfter just a year in market, our ingredients are already in dozens of products from household pet brands. And 95% of our first-time customers are launching additional products with us.\n\nEach ingredient improves our discovery platform, clinical engine, and manufacturing expertise, so we can develop the next one faster and at lower cost.\n\nWe’ve raised nearly $40M from leading investors to bring our ingredients to more brands and markets around the world.\n\nOur number one priority is turning proven ingredient performance and early commercial traction into repeatable growth across customers and markets. We’re looking for highly resourceful, high-throughput individuals who solve problems from first principles, make sound decisions, communicate clearly, and move quickly.\nMore than $1.2 trillion is spent every year on pet and human health products. Our ambition is to make clinical efficacy the standard across that entire market.\nAll full-time roles are in person at our Brooklyn Navy Yard headquarters and lab.\nAbout the role\nKingdom’s next stage of growth depends on bringing more Superculture® ingredients into customers’ products. That requires rigorous evidence of how our ingredients work, perform in formulations, and withstand manufacturing and storage. We’re building a dedicated scientific function to lead that work and help customers evaluate and adopt our ingredients.\nAs Senior or Principal Scientist, Ingredient Development, you will lead our in vitro validation function, combining scientific direction with hands-on execution. You’ll determine which questions matter most, choose the experiments that answer them, and use the results to guide development. Your work will connect scientific judgment with practical decisions about how ingredients are developed and used.\nYou’ll work closely with bioprocess, clinical development, regulatory, and commercial colleagues to connect laboratory findings with customer needs. This means helping colleagues and customers understand what the evidence establishes, where uncertainty remains, and what further work would support adoption. Scientific leadership and collaboration will be central to your impact.\nThis is an opportunity to shape how Kingdom develops ingredients across a growing portfolio. Success means rigorous, timely validation and clear evidence that supports customer evaluation. You’ll expand your leadership through scientific direction and mentoring, while remaining involved in the experimental work that moves ingredients forward.\nIf you join, you will:\nLead in vitro validation across projects\nOwn the in vitro validation strategy across ingredient programs, identify evidence gaps, and design and execute studies of efficacy, safety, mechanisms of action, stability, shelf-life, and analytical characterization, including comparisons with other ingredients.\n\nPlan and coordinate external testing with contract research organizations (CROs), defining study designs, deliverables, and timelines. Assess data quality and interpret findings to guide ingredient development.\n\nLead formulation development, working with the bioprocess team to account for manufacturing processes and requirements as production scales.\n\nConnect technical development to customer needs\nMaintain a shared database of ingredient evidence, contributions across teams, and remaining gaps. Translate findings into technical materials, formulation guidance, and safety and stability documentation, coordinating scientific, safety, and regulatory review.\n\nHelp the commercial team explain ingredient efficacy, safety, and mechanisms of action to customers, engaging independently as experience allows. Together, turn customer feedback into development priorities, distinguishing immediate adoption barriers from longer-term needs.\n\nOwn responses to in vitro and formulation questions, setting realistic timelines and following through. Coordinate clinical and in vivo questions with the clinical team through its established process, agreeing on scientific input and response timing.\n\nWe’re looking for you if you have:\nA PhD in a relevant life-sciences field plus 3-4 years of work experience; more experienced candidates are encouraged to apply\n\nRigorous experimental design, quantitative analysis, and interpretation of efficacy and mechanisms-of-action studies\n\nHands-on experience developing, validating, and troubleshooting cell-based models and assays, with reproducible, transferable protocols\n\nThe ability to synthesize evidence clearly into reports and datasets, including limitations and needs for further testing or specialist review\n\nScientific leadership: the ability to set direction, make decisions, and build a function while remaining accountable for its work\n\nStructured planning and prioritization across projects: identifying evidence gaps and dependencies, allocating effort, and resolving blockers with relevant stakeholders\n\nScientific judgment under ambiguity: choosing informative experiments, balancing depth of investigation with urgency, and recognizing when specialist input is needed\n\nClear communication and collaboration: explaining evidence, translating requests into scientific questions, and agreeing on realistic commitments\n\nPractical experience using AI to support scientific work, with independent verification of outputs\n\nExperience working with CROs: defining study objectives and deliverables, assessing proposed methods, and critically reviewing results\n\nIntellectual curiosity and enjoyment of learning unfamiliar biology\n\nWorking with us\nKingdom is based in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, with our full team working out of a 9,000 sq-ft headquarters and lab space. We operate in a high-trust, high-autonomy environment, which requires that everyone uphold our core values:\nSolve from first principles. We have a deep-seated curiosity about the most important problems facing the business. Our nature is to dig deeply into their details, question assumptions, understand the smallest details, and drive towards the best possible solution using these insights. This makes us very effective in crafting new solutions and operating in ambiguous circumstances.\n\nCollaborate with kindness. We are very low ego, and treat each other with respect, compassion, and humility. We hold one another to high standards, but do so while being deeply committed to each other's wellbeing. We invest in each other's growth, and are willing to engage in difficult conversations and deliver direct, constructive feedback when necessary.\n\nBe resourceful and resilient. We figure out how to make things work, and how to accomplish our goals regardless of what stands in the way. We're keen to confront challenges together through proactive planning and scrappy methods. When things go wrong, we learn quickly from our missteps, adapt our approach, and push forward.\n\nWe provide competitive compensation with generous equity. Everyone who joins Kingdom will be a major contributor to our success, which we reflect in our approach to ownership and compensation. The cash salary range for this role is $132.5-205K for Senior or Principal Scientist, with the final starting salary being determined by qualifications, experience, skill set, and internal equity. Our salary ranges are based on paying competitively for our company’s size and industry, and are one part of a total compensation package that also includes benefits (more below) and equity (to be discussed more during the interview process).\nWe also provide a rich benefits package to support our team:\nFully covered, best-in-class medical, vision, and dental insurance\n\nFree memberships to One Medical, Teladoc, and Talkspace\n\nFlexible PTO, in addition to 13 paid company holidays (including a weeklong winter closure from Christmas Eve through New Year's Day)\n\n12 weeks of fully paid parental leave, with the option to extend up to 24 weeks total\n\n401(k) plan, FSA option, and commuter benefit of your choice\n\nFully stocked kitchen with fruits, snacks, coffee, and tea, plus weekly team lunches\n\nKingdom is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related condition, or any other basis protected by law.","description_format":"text","description_chars":9054,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":3,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"phd","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Dental insurance","Equity","Parental leave"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Microbiome","Pet Food, Supplies & Care","Food Ingredients"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-11-02T22:37:34Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":71,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.752,"p_room":0.945,"age_days":9,"expected_fill_days":22,"reasons":["conf:1","win:mid"],"computed_at":"2026-11-12T10:38:37Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":205000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/kingdom-senior-principal-scientist-ingredient-development","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/kingdom-senior-principal-scientist-ingredient-development.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-12T13:34:15Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":28230,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-13T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":2784},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=2784"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fkingdom-senior-principal-scientist-ingredient-development"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":2,"usd":0.2},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fkingdom-senior-principal-scientist-ingredient-development"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fkingdom-senior-principal-scientist-ingredient-development"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/kingdom-senior-principal-scientist-ingredient-development\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fkingdom-senior-principal-scientist-ingredient-development"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3645306}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"kingdomsuperculture.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3645306},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. Docs: https://alion.io/developers"}}