International Quality Assurance Manager

We are hiring for our first dedicated international quality hire at Grüns. You'll own the quality system for every market outside the US: product release, specifications, complaints and adverse events, incident management, contract manufacturer oversight, stability, and transit qualification. For products sold in the EU, you'll build and run the Quality Management System processes that keep us compliant with EU and local market requirements across the product lifecycle.

Today these responsibilities sit informally with the US QA team. The job is to figure out where they should live, build the processes, and then run them. You'll work across Regulatory, Supply Chain, Operations, and our external manufacturing and 3PL partners, and you'll be the escalation point when something goes wrong in an international market.

While this role is part of our global remote HQ, we feel a candidate based in or around Germany or the United Kingdom will be most successful in this role.

The team members you’ll be working with most are in multiple countries and time zones, so we ask that you are comfortable working a way that allows for some overlap in working hours to collaborate.

More generally, we operate in a fully remote, high trust environment with teammates across multiple countries and time zones. While we work async by default, we come together in person twice a year for offsites that help us connect, align, and build real relationships IRL.

In this role, you will:

• Release finished products only after verifying specs, COAs, manufacturing docs, deviations, and market-specific requirements
• Own consumer complaint intake and triage across level 1, 2, and 3
• Build and run traceability, recall/withdrawal, mock recall, complaint, adverse-event, and food safety incident processes for EU products
• Own supplier and contract manufacturer qualification: Quality Agreements, audits, CAPAs/SCARs, deviations, change controls, investigations, ongoing performance monitoring
• Run BMT testing and oversee microbiological, chemical, allergen, contaminant, nutritional, and stability testing, including OOS/OOT investigations and third-party labs
• Assess quality and regulatory risk on any formulation, ingredient, supplier, process, spec, packaging, or labeling change before it ships. Even a packaging color update can get held at customs in markets like China without sign-off
• Partner with Regulatory Affairs to keep formulations, specs, labels, claims, and packaging compliant by market
• Own quality oversight of international manufacturing, packaging, warehousing, and distribution partners, including 3PLs
• Set and monitor international quality KPIs and keep us audit-ready

We're looking for someone who:

• Has a minimum of 5 years of quality assurance experience in food, beverage, dietary supplement, or consumer health, with meaningful time spent on products sold outside the US
• Has hands-on EU and international quality experience. You've managed quality processes for food, dietary supplement, or consumer health products sold in the EU and across multiple regulatory jurisdictions, and you understand how quality and regulatory requirements differ by market
• Has working knowledge of EU food and food supplement quality requirements, including GMP and food safety requirements, HACCP, traceability and recall, allergen management, specifications, supplier and contract manufacturer controls, analytical testing, stability, change control, product release, and labeling and claims oversight. Experience across multiple EU member states is a strong plus
• Has real depth in core quality systems: you've owned CAPAs, investigations, root cause analysis, specification creation, document control, and change control, not just participated in them
• Has qualified, audited, and managed external manufacturers and co-packers, and held them to account
• Has owned or contributed materially to a recall, withdrawal, or market action, and knows what good looks like under pressure
• Is comfortable owning stability protocols and managing third-party labs
• Can work across US, UK/EU, and Asia time zones with a distributed team and external partners

Approach to the role:

• You treat documentation as protection, not paperwork
• You catch the small stuff, like a packaging color change, before it turns into a blocked shipment
• You build with scale in mind, since we're small today and growing internationally fast
• You bring high ownership and don't need to be micromanaged to move fast