Head of Quality Assurance📣 Job Ad

About the Role

The Bridge Associates is seeking a Head of Quality Assurance on behalf of its client, a prominent organization located in Jeddah, Makkah, Saudi Arabia. This full-time position requires 5-10 years of experience and is responsible for leading the quality function across the organization. The role ensures the highest standards of product quality, food safety, compliance, and consumer safety.

The Head of Quality Assurance will build a robust quality culture across manufacturing, sourcing, R&D, supply chain, and distribution, while driving continuous improvement and ensuring adherence to all applicable regulatory and industry standards.

Quality Strategy and Leadership

This role involves developing and implementing a comprehensive quality strategy aligned with business and consumer expectations. Key responsibilities include:

• Developing and implementing the overall quality strategy in line with business and consumer expectations.
• Building robust quality systems, processes, and governance across the organization.
• Establishing quality KPIs, dashboards, and review mechanisms.
• Driving a strong quality-first culture across manufacturing and business teams.
• Leading and developing the quality team across plants, corporate, and regional operations.

Operational Quality and Compliance

The Head of Quality Assurance is responsible for establishing and monitoring quality standards, ensuring compliance, and managing food safety systems. This includes:

• Establishing and monitoring quality standards and specifications for raw materials, packaging, and finished products.
• Ensuring consistent product quality across manufacturing locations and third-party manufacturing partners.
• Developing and strengthening SOPs, quality protocols, inspection systems, and testing procedures.
• Driving root-cause analysis and corrective/preventive actions for quality deviations.
• Monitoring product complaints, quality incidents, returns, and consumer feedback, and driving their closure.
• Ensuring compliance with applicable FSSAI and other regulatory requirements, along with relevant quality and food-safety standards.
• Owning the organization's food safety and quality management systems.
• Leading internal, external, customer, and regulatory audits.
• Ensuring timely closure of audit observations and corrective actions.
• Staying updated on evolving regulations and industry standards and translating them into business requirements.

Supply Chain and Product Quality

This position involves close collaboration with various departments to integrate quality throughout the product lifecycle and supply chain:

• Partnering closely with Manufacturing, Procurement, R&D, and Supply Chain teams to ensure quality at every stage.
• Establishing quality standards for vendors, suppliers, and contract manufacturers.
• Developing supplier quality assessment, audit, and improvement programs.
• Supporting new product development, scale-up, and commercialization from a quality perspective.
• Ensuring effective quality controls across warehousing, transportation, and distribution.

Continuous Improvement Initiatives

A core aspect of the role is to drive continuous improvement in quality processes and outcomes:

• Identifying opportunities to improve product consistency, reduce quality-related costs, and minimize wastage.
• Implementing CAPA, Lean, Six Sigma, and other continuous improvement methodologies where relevant.
• Utilizing quality data and analytics to identify trends and proactively address potential risks.
• Driving standardization of processes across plants and manufacturing partners.

Candidate Profile and Experience

Candidates for this role should possess a strong background in quality leadership and a proven track record of managing complex quality functions. Required qualifications include:

• 5-10 years of experience in quality leadership roles.
• Experience leading quality teams across multiple manufacturing locations is preferred.
• Experience working with contract manufacturers and supplier quality management is an advantage.
• Demonstrated experience in handling product quality issues and consumer complaints.
• Ability to balance quality, compliance, consumer expectations, and business realities.
• Strong leadership capability with the ability to build and mentor high-performing teams.