Quality Lab Technician

Quality Lab Technician

Test it. Document it. Hold it or release it. Keep the lab honest so the plant can run.

This is a bench seat at a ~60-person Northern Kentucky flavor manufacturer — liquids and powders — not a corporate quality office and not a manager job. You work on a four-person quality team. Everyone reports to the Quality Manager. Your lane is the product in front of you: raw materials, liquid flavors, and powdered flavors.

The work

You prepare, review, and approve what comes in and what goes out. When the data is wrong, the lot does not move. When the data is clean, production and shipping can do their jobs.

• Prepare, review, and approve raw materials, liquid flavors, and powdered flavors.
• Run the testing the release decision depends on, and record it so someone else could follow the trail.
• Collect and analyze lab data — trends, outliers, repeat failures — and flag them before they become a customer problem.
• Keep samples, paperwork, and results organized. In a small lab, a messy notebook is a quality event.
• Work the floor and the lab with operations and flavor creation when a result does not match what they expected.
• Help tighten how the lab works: methods, checklists, how results get recorded. This seat is built for someone who will improve the process, not just live in it.

You will get a slice of plant quality — holds, deviations, helping the team get ready for an audit — but you are not the SQF owner and you do not run the department. Four people. One manager. Your job is the testing and the call on the lot.

Why someone good would take this

• You touch real product, not a ticket queue.
• The team is small enough that your work is visible. Do it well and there is a path up.
• They want the next process, not a finished one.
• Flavor plant, not a 400-person QC department.

Poor fit if you want a manager title, a team under you, or a job that is only the audit binder and no bench.

What you need to have done

Two or more years in a lab that released product. Food, flavor, beverage, ingredient, chemical, or CPG is the cleanest match.

• You have tested incoming materials or finished product and understood why a result meant hold or release.
• You have kept data other people had to trust.
• You stay organized when the lab is busy.
• You can talk to production without making it a fight.

A science degree helps. Time on a real bench matters more.

Pay, place, process

$60,000–$70,000. On-site in Northern Kentucky. Four-person quality team, report to the Quality Manager.