Scientist II - Chemistry and Intellectual Property

Job Description

It’s an exciting time to be part of the IFF family! We are a global leader in value-added ingredients, providing our customers with a broad range of innovative solutions for the food & beverage, home & personal care, and health & wellness end markets. We are world-class innovators with expertise in the areas of taste, texture, scent, nutrition, enzymes, cultures, plant-based proteins and probiotics and are guided by our purpose:  applying science and creativity for a better world.

We are serving 3,000 customers in 162 countries, with 69 creative & application centers, 37 manufacturing facilities and 6 R&D centers worldwide. The Hilversum location is a creative & application center with over 400 international employees, and it supports categories like Consumer Fragrance, Fragrance Ingredients, Cosmetic Actives, Beverage, Dairy, Sweet and Savory

Role Scope:
This job is based in IFF’s Fabric Care Creative Centre of Excellence, but the scope of the role extends across to all Scent division categories, including fine fragrance, home and beauty care.

This role is at the critical interface of technical understanding, intellectual property and market knowledge. It is focused on generating and sharing technical knowledge to support the development and commercialization of fragrance delivery technology. The role ensures this knowledge is captured to facilitate innovation and leveraged to key creative, commercial and technical stakeholders within IFF.
The role also helps leverage key IP related knowledge and skills to the global technical scent community and partners on this with the IFF legal team.

Responsibilities
1.    Support the development of technology for fabric and home care applications, working with technical, legal and creative colleagues. This support includes:
a.    Lead parts of scent technology development projects for fabric/home care projects
b.    Connect knowledge on developing and commercialized IFF technology to known information from the patent literature/public domain information.
2.    Drive landscaping of patent literature and other public domain information, through leading a cross-functional team. Share these insights with technical and non-technical colleagues in various forms and capture these in key databases.
3.    Partner with legal and technical colleagues to support drafting, prosecuting and defending patent applications, customer patent inquiries
4.    Support the Education and Awareness on patenting across key Scent focus areas and (Help) Generate Intellectual Property.
5.    Management and (help) guide the development of databases for experimental technology data and for IP review databases.
6.    Manage one direct report

Job Requirements

Job Relevant Competencies:
•    Creativity
•    Dealing with Ambiguity
•    Developing Others
•    Peer and cross-functional Relationships
•    Technical Acumen
•    Courage
•    Presentation Skills

Essential qualification:
•    MSc degree in Physical/Organic Chemistry or related discipline. 
Preferred:
•    PhD degree in Physical/Organic Chemistry or related discipline.

Required Experience:
•    Minimum 6 (MSc); 3 (PhD) years of experience in the industrial food, pharmaceutical, chemical, cosmetic, consumer goods and/or fragrance industry.
•    2-4 years of experience in technical role in any of above industries. 
•    Work independently on large projects without direct manager supervision.
•    Project Management.
•    Solid Chemistry background.
•    Exposure to patent reading, searching and invention disclosures – no patent attorney qualifications required.
•    Fluency in English (Verbal and Written); other languages are a plus.

Preferred but not required Skills:
•    Technical consumer product and/or fragrance knowledge
•    Ability to handle complex datasets and Basic Programming Knowledge
•    Exposure to external partnerships