Quality Assurance Manager

Job Description

Job Description

Benefits:

• 401(k)
• Dental insurance
• Health insurance
• Vision insurance

Since 1985, we've been a family-run, direct-trade coffee roaster on a mission bigger than coffee: transforming lives. We believe everyone should win in every transaction, and we've built this company that way for four decades — through a beverage truck, a warehouse, a distribution network, and soon a retail storefront with our name on the glass. We're working to become an employee-owned and operated company that directly supports the coffee farming communities we buy from, because the same care that goes into every drink we make should reach the people who grow it. This is a seat at a table still small enough for your voice to matter, and ambitious enough that your effort has a real path toward becoming something you'll one day hold a piece of. Right now, a few of those seats are empty, and we're looking for someone who wants to fill one.

The Role

The Quality Assurance Manager owns the standard behind every bag of coffee Java City roasts, packs, and ships — from incoming green coffee to the cup a customer pours at home. This is a hands-on role at a growing roasting facility, not a desk job removed from the floor: you'll be in the roasting room, in the warehouse, and in the lab, building and enforcing the systems that keep quality consistent as the company scales toward a retail storefront and a wider distribution footprint. You'll own food safety compliance, supplier quality, batch consistency, and the documentation that proves all of it holds up under audit — and you'll do it at a company still small enough that your standards become the standard, not one voice among many layers of sign-off.

What You'll Do

• Own and maintain Java City's food safety and quality systems for the roasting and packaging operation, including cupping protocols, roast profile consistency, and green coffee grading against defect and moisture standards
• Serve as the facility's Person in Charge for food safety compliance and maintain the Injury and Illness Prevention Program (IIPP) , including scheduled reviews and the acknowledgment log
• Manage incoming quality inspection for green coffee shipments, packaging materials, and other inputs, including supplier documentation and traceability records
• Conduct routine internal audits of production, packaging, and warehouse practices, and lead corrective action when a batch, a process, or a supplier falls outside spec
• Maintain food safety documentation appropriate to a coffee roasting and packaging facility, and prepare the facility for third-party or customer quality audits
• Coordinate with the Lockout/Tagout (LOTO) program and equipment-specific energy control procedures already in place for roasting and packaging equipment
• Track and trend quality metrics — defect rates, customer complaints, roast consistency — and report findings to leadership with recommended corrective and preventive actions
• Train production staff on food safety protocols, sanitation standards, and quality checkpoints, and maintain training records for compliance purposes
• Support new product and process rollouts, including the upcoming retail storefront, by building quality checkpoints into new workflows before they launch

What You Bring

• 3+ years in quality assurance or food safety management in a food or beverage manufacturing environment; coffee roasting or specialty food production experience strongly preferred
• Working knowledge of HACCP principles and Cal/OSHA Title 8 requirements for manufacturing facilities, including IIPP administration
• ServSafe Manager certification or equivalent, or ability to obtain within [insert timeframe]
• Experience building or maintaining quality documentation that holds up under third-party or customer audit
• Comfort on the production floor — this role spends real time in the roasting room and warehouse, not only reviewing paperwork
• Strong written documentation skills; you'll be the person whose records answer an auditor's or a customer's questions
• A collaborative approach to enforcing standards — you'll be setting expectations for production staff day to day, and how you do that matters as much as what you catch