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Job Purpose and Impact

The Research and Development Strategic Account Technical Lead will lead the efforts to develop and implement innovation pipeline identified by both Cargill and customer.  This includes actively aligning priorities with strategic account team in Cargill, orchestrating and developing a customer driven R&D team across R&D job family and enabling capabilities to execute the initiatives defined in Customer Development Plan, and meet business goals set for the strategic account.

In this role, you will be the voice of strategic customer’s technical function, you will identify new business opportunities via understanding in innovation strategic fit and technical capabilities.  Though the role does not necessarily hierarchical manage a team that executes the solution development, you need to lead, prioritize and report progress made on customer projects in Cargill stakeholders as well as communicate to customer’s technical stakeholders to ensure a collaborative and team work culture that encourages trustworthy and long term partnership.

Key Accountabilities

• Develop strong customer relationships at key accounts, with zipped relationship at executional and leadership levels
• Collaborate with GTM and category leaders in developing annual account plan and regular business review.  
• Define and monitor technical metrics for the strategic account, report to stakeholders on monthly, and call for actions in R&D
• Organize innovation workshops or key initiatives as defined in Customer development plan,  and leverage and orchestrating R&D capabilities in the region ang global
• Monitor the investmentand outcomes, and evaluate capabilities needed for short to long term that sustain the partnership in annual resource planning.
• Manage critical projects and ensure appropriate staff.   In time of gap in resource or capability, be able to intervene and request attention.
• Provide expert thought leadership in customer innovation and be able to leverage available capabilities in Research, Food Innovation, and Innovation Ecosystem, to identify long term innovation opportunities. 
• Other duties as assigned

Qualifications

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor’s degree in a related field or equivalent experience
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills
• Minimum of six years in customer facing technical service experience
• Other minimum qualifications may apply

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Master's degree or other post-secondary degree, Doctorate degree
• Managing projects of high rigor and complexity (across countries)
• Practical experience in applying ingredients in food as appropriate (preference for Cargill portfolio ingredients)

KEY BEHAVIORS

• Develop and deliver multimode communications that convey a clear understanding of the unique needs of different audiences.
• Anticipate and adopt innovations in business-building digital and technology applications.
• Make sense of complex, high-quantity, and sometimes contradictory, information to effectively solve problems.

SKILLS AND EXPERIENCES TO BE GAINED

• Demonstrable successful results in a technical position.
• Experience at building competitive advantage through the use of the organization’s technical capabilities, and by providing product innovation and other creative solutions.
• Experience with cross-functional and multi-cultural teams.