Ready to be the person who keeps the whole place running? Nothing we do works if the water, power and freezers don't.
Changing the world - one fruit fly at a time.
We've developed a novel insect-based expression platform to enable bio-products across humanity's most critical verticals.
We're unleashing the next biorevolution.
At Future Fields, we are continually learning and evolving. We know we don't have all the answers, but we try to ask all the questions. We believe in "failing forward" and leveraging our mistakes to help us grow. We never want our team to feel constrained by the status quo and we don't judge ideas based on where they come from. We actively work to foster a culture of collaboration, innovation and psychological safety through transparency, structure, and open communication. We know it sounds cliché, but every employee really is a valued and equal member of the Future Fields team.
Come find your purpose with Future Fields.
We are a rapidly growing venture-backed startup (with support from awesome investors including Bee Partners, Y Combinator, BDC Climate Tech, R7 Partners, Toyota Ventures and Amplify Capital). We've even had a shoutout from Ironman himself! Joining our team now means you'll have the opportunity to shape our culture and products, to lead others, and to influence the direction of our company. Perhaps most importantly, you'll be joining a team that is genuinely energized by this work and the meaningful potential of biotech to change the world.
About The Role
This is a broad, important job, and it is hands-on from day one. You'll be receiving liquid nitrogen, changing filters, running the preventive maintenance schedule, keeping consumables stocked, chasing the contractor who said it will be done by Tuesday, and writing down what you did so the next person doesn't have to work it out from scratch. Some of it is skilled. Some of it is a wrench and a Thursday afternoon.
We need someone who is good at both and above neither.
Our operations span two adjacent downtown Edmonton properties on a single lot: a 1950s brick warehouse housing our offices and upper-floor lab, and Instar, a repurposed 1980s facility transformed via a $3M buildout into an insect-rearing space and cleanroom. Together, these buildings feature complex infrastructure, including cleanroom-dedicated HVAC, an RO water purification setup, humidification systems, compressed air lines, -80°C cold storage, a basement currently in development, and an expanding suite of industrial equipment. With daily demands across these systems currently addressed on an ad hoc basis by whoever is available, dedicated oversight is required to keep everything running smoothly.
You'll report to Abbas, our Lab Operations Lead, and escalate technical problems to Brian, our Senior Engineer. You won't have direct reports, but you will direct contractors and service vendors, and within a year you should be the person the whole company goes to when something in the building isn't right.
You don't need a ticket, a diploma, or any biotech experience to do this job well. We'll go into that below, because we mean it.
This role will own
Receiving and materials handling
- Own receiving end-to-end across both buildings: inspect what arrives, check it against the packing slip and paperwork, and flag damage or discrepancies before anything moves.
- Log every incoming lot in Benchling - lot number, expiry, certificate of analysis - so what's on the shelf and what's in the system agree.
- Hold material until it's been checked against its specification and released, then get it into the right storage: ambient, cold, flammables, acids. Keep expired stock out of circulation before someone reaches for it.
- Catch temperature-sensitive shipments before they sit. Know whether a box belongs in the fridge or the -20°C freezer and get it there immediately.
- Be the person on site for deliveries that don't book a time: liquid nitrogen, gas cylinders, equipment.
Equipment maintenance and upkeep
- Routine maintenance on lab and production equipment: filter changes, cleaning, consumable swaps, the small recurring work that keeps instruments alive.
- Build and run a documented preventive maintenance schedule across equipment and building systems - and execute it rather than aspire to it.
- Schedule contractor and vendor service, be present for it, and record what was actually done before you sign.
- Be the first look when something stops working. Check the obvious things yourself, know when it's past you, and get the right person in.
Building systems and general upkeep
- Help keep both buildings running: HVAC, RO and process water, compressed air, humidification, cold storage, electrical, plumbing, drainage, lifts. The routine and preventive side is yours; the engineering problems are Brian's, and you'll learn a great deal working alongside him on them.
- Small repairs are yours. Leaks, blocked drains, a door that won't latch, a failed sensor, the daily unglamorous list.
- Own the spaces nobody owns - basement, storage areas, loading dock, front room - on a schedule, not when it becomes a flood.
- Own the facilities request queue, so facilities questions stop landing on our engineering team.
Inventory and consumables
- Support consumables inventory across both buildings: what we have, what's running out, and what hasn't moved in a year.
- Order against real usage. A stockout should be something you prevented, not something you reported.
- Own utility accounts, waste pickup, and gas and consumables ordering.
Documentation
- Write the one-pagers that don't exist yet - what to do when the freezer beeps, how to refill the liquid nitrogen, where the filters are and how to change them. Not audited SOPs. The practical version, for the Friday evening when the people who know are gone.
- Keep them where people will actually find them: attached to the equipment record in our Lab Information Management System (Benchling) and our Quality Management System (Qualio).
- Build and maintain a register of our equipment and utilities across both buildings - what we have, where it is, what it's connected to, and what it draws. Nobody has ever written this down in one place, and we need it.
- Maintain one live contact register - suppliers, sales reps, service techs - mapped to the equipment each of them covers. Today that information is split across three systems and nobody checks any of them.
- Keep equipment records current: service reports, repairs, dates, costs.
- Document every repair. If it happened and it isn't written down, it didn't happen.
What You'll Grow Into
- Supporting qualification of our facilities and utilities - cleanroom pressure differentials, HEPA certification, water system sampling, HVAC performance. A contractor authors the protocols; you'll execute them on the live systems and own the monitoring programs afterwards. We will teach you IQ/OQ of instruments.
- Mapping facility and utility capacity against our manufacturing roadmap, so our next physical constraint is a decision rather than an emergency.
- More of the building, as fast as you can take it on.
About You
You are practical, and you finish things. You'd rather fix it than file a ticket about it, and you write down what you did because you've been the person who had to guess what someone else did.
What We Need You To Have Done Before
- Hands-on maintenance or facilities work - a plant, a lab, a shop, a farm, a processing facility. Not office facilities. Somewhere things break and you were the one who dealt with it.
- Fixed the small things yourself rather than dispatching them. You own tools, and you know what you can and can't safely take apart.
- Dealt with contractors or vendors, at least at the level of booking the work, being there for it, and checking what was actually done.
- Written things down - records, logs, procedures, checklists - somewhere that someone else relied on.
- Worked without much day-to-day direction. You'll have a manager and you'll have support, but most days nobody is standing over you deciding what's next.
- Comfortable with the physical parts of the job: lifting, ladders, cylinders, cold rooms, an early start when a delivery needs one.
What Matters More Than The Resume
- Resourcefulness. You can improvise a working fix out of what's on hand while the proper part is three weeks away - and you know the difference between a good fix and a bad one.
- A real work ethic. You know what a day's work is, and no task here is beneath you.
- Independent thought. We're small enough that "acceptable" doesn't work. We'd rather you ask an obvious question than quietly do the wrong thing, and we'd rather you tell us the plan is wrong than execute it neatly.
- You want to learn this properly. The building is getting more complicated - cleanrooms, qualification, a formal quality system. We'd like you to grow into that with us.
Where you might be coming from
Contract or analytical labs, food and beverage processing, brewing, agriculture, building or equipment maintenance, a service or field-tech role, the trades, or the military. An apprenticeship, a journeyman ticket, a technologist diploma, or none of the above - we care about what you've kept running, not which of those it was. Roughly 2–3 years of hands-on work of some kind, and we're more interested in the shape of it than the length.
Your future (with Future Fields)
This roadmap outlines the impact you'll make as you grow with us. We'll use this as a guide for your first year, knowing that in a fast-paced environment, we'll adapt and evolve these goals together.
Within 1 Month, You Will
- Learn both buildings - what's in them, what they do, and which systems stop production when they fail. You'll walk them with Abbas and Brian until you know them better than either of them want to admit.
- Take over receiving: packages logged, temperature-sensitive shipments caught, liquid nitrogen and gas cylinders handled without anyone else being pulled away from their desk.
- Develop a working understanding of our technology and end-to-end process, from strain development and insect rearing through processing, purification and customer delivery - enough to know why the systems you're looking after matter.
- Start the equipment and utility register, and tell us the first three things you think we should fix.
Within 3 Months, You Will
- Own receiving, gas cylinders, consumables ordering, utilities accounts and waste pickup outright, with a real view of what we use and what we're paying.
- Have a documented preventive maintenance schedule live for lab and production equipment, and be executing it.
- Be the first responder for anything broken, and be handling most of the small repairs yourself.
- Have the facilities request queue running through you, so facilities questions stop landing on our engineering team.
- Have written your first set of practical one-pagers, attached to equipment records in Benchling and printed on the instruments.
Within 6 Months, You Will
- Have the equipment and utility register complete across both buildings, and the contact register live and actually used.
- Have the preventive maintenance schedule extended to building systems, with contractor service scheduled, attended and recorded.
- Have taken the basement from a junk pile to a managed space on a documented plan - a real, visible win that has been waiting for someone to own it.
- Be trusted with vendor relationships: you book the work, you're there for it, and you check what was done before we pay for it.
- Have started supporting qualification work on live systems alongside our contractor and our Head of Quality.
Within 12 Months, You Will
- Be the person the whole company goes to when something isn't right, and the person who usually already knows about it.
- Have meaningfully reduced the time our Senior Engineer and Lab Operations Lead spend on routine building and equipment work - which is, honestly, the main reason we're hiring.
- Own the monitoring programs that come out of qualification: pressure differentials, HEPA certification, water sampling, HVAC performance trending.
- Have a documented history of the buildings. What we have, what we did to it, when, and by whom.
- Be a candidate for more - whether that's deeper into facilities and qualification, into equipment and maintenance, or somewhere else entirely. We'd rather grow this role around the right person than cap it.
About Our Team
Our story and approach to science are anything but conventional. Matt (co-founder/CEO) was a touring punk rock musician who dropped out of University before returning to complete his PhD in cell biology. Jalene (co-founder/COO) is a social researcher by training, previously working on issues from the right to affordable housing to harm reduction. The spark of an idea for our technology came while waiting in line for tiny, Canadian donuts. Our broader team of scientists, engineers, circus performers, restaurateurs, dancers, music aficionados, kid parents, pet parents, cyclists, and artists hail from every corner of the world - from small town Alberta to Poland, India, Vietnam and Pakistan. We credit our diverse team and experiences as the key to our success - and we encourage candidates of all identities and backgrounds to apply.
FAQs
Where is Future Fields located?
Our headquarters and production facility are located in downtown Edmonton, Alberta, in a renovated historic warehouse. From the exposed brick to our summer patio - it's not your average lab space. It is central, close to transit and bike lanes, and walking distance to some of the city's best coffee shops, restaurants and Edmonton's incredible river valley.
I don't have a ticket or a diploma. Should I apply?
Yes. We are looking for someone smart, practical and technically minded, and we don't much care how you got that way. If you've kept things running somewhere and you're good with your hands and your head, apply. We'd rather train the right person than hire the right paperwork.
I've never worked in a lab or in biotech. Is that a problem?
No. Most of what this job needs is transferable - receiving, maintenance, repairs, records, vendors. We'll teach you the rest, including the parts about cleanrooms and quality systems. Plenty of people here came from somewhere completely different.
Is this role on-site?
Yes, entirely. You can't fix a building remotely.
Is this a shift or on-call role?
Standard weekday hours, with the occasional early start when a delivery needs one. Buildings and freezers break inconveniently, so there will be times we call you outside of hours. It isn't frequent, and we don't take it for granted.
Any other perks?
Many! Some include: comprehensive health, dental and vision benefits; flexible paid time off policy; and the office is always stocked with snacks and all the coffee you can drink.
Will I like working for a startup?
Great question. Startup life is definitely not for everyone. We move quickly. Projects and priorities shift fast. There is a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty at times and we're not immune to the growing pains of a rapidly scaling startup. The risk is high, but so is the reward. We promise you will never get bored. You will have fun and learn a lot. You will grow personally and professionally in ways you never imagined (alongside our company). You will be part of something much bigger than yourself and contribute directly to the mission of a team who cares deeply about changing the world for the better. Oh, and equity!
Sound like something you are interested in? Here are the next steps:
Apply online using our job portal.
Application deadline: This role will remain open until a suitable candidate is found.
If it seems like a good fit, next steps will look somewhat like this:
- We will contact you for a casual 15-minute video call.
- We'll bring you in and walk you through both buildings, so we can talk about real equipment in front of real equipment.
- We'll arrange another interview to figure out how you fit with our team and culture, and better understand your career trajectory.
- We will set up a coffee chat with you and a team member. This is your chance to dig in and find out what it's really like to work for Future Fields. This is for you!
- We will speak with two of your references to confirm our assumption that you are, in fact, our next great hire.
- We offer you a job!
We are committed to building a diverse team and are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We welcome and encourage applications from all qualified individuals, including those with disabilities and candidates from all backgrounds and identities. Please note that for this specific position, we are unable to provide sponsorship for work authorization; candidates must currently be legally authorized to work in Canada.
