Job Description

Segment : Royal Canin

Contract Permanent/CDI

Location Aimargues (near to Montpellier)

Royal Canin’s R&D function generates thousands of heterogeneous data points daily across ingredient and product analytics, industrial trials, internal animal studies (palatability, digestibility, urinary composition) or external animal studies (pet owner or veterinary and clinical assessment outcomes, biological measurements etc.). The Predictive Research Scientist – Scientific Data Steward ensures that this massive volume of technical, biological and clinical data is collected, standardized, and stored sustainably, qualitatively and securely on pre-approved platforms, in order to be used in advanced data modeling.

This role serves as the central data architect for the R&D teams, bridging the gap between researchers, facilities and external R&D collaborators. By implementing robust data governance and establishing repeatable data ingestion pipelines, this role ensures that R&D scientific data raw data is turned into a coherent, documented and reusable data asset, to provide a clean and trustworthy foundation on which our data science work is built (using FAIR data principles: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable).

What are we looking for ?

- Education & Professional Qualifications

• Essential "dual” profile: A university degree (Master's or PhD preferred) in a Biological, Biochemical, or Animal Science discipline, paired with a postgraduate degree or professional certification in Clinical Data Management, Health Informatics, or Database Engineering.

- Knowledge & Experience

• Minimum Experience: 3+ years of professional experience in clinical database design or research data management within a biopharmaceutical company, life-science enterprise, or Contract Research Organization (CRO).
• Language Fluency in written and spoken English is mandatory.

Key Responsibilities

- Data Governance, Integrity & Standardization

• Data models & vocabularies: Design and deploy unified research data models, master data schemas, and metadata standards (using FAIR data principles: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) across Royal Canin R&D.
• Clinical database architecture: Lead the configuration, testing, and lifecycle maintenance of clinical databases and Electronic Data Capture (EDC) schemes for external clinical studies, currently Prelude, as well as internal diet trial data using the Facilities designed tool (Monarch).
• Database indexation: Create a thesaurus of all data available across R&D functions to enable faster search and future studies
• Regulatory & patent readiness: Ensure all clinical trial data complies with international research guidelines (such as Good Clinical Practice - GCP, and Mars R&D guidelines) to support claims-substantiation dossiers and patent filings.

- External Data Acquisition & Pipeline Engineering

• Data Transfer Agreements: In collaboration with the Legal team, review and govern DTAs with external collaborators (laboratories, universities, etc.), defining the exact formats, schemes, and transmission timelines for external datasets.
• Automated ingestion pipelines: Develop and maintain automated scripts to clean, validate, and ingest complex biological data streams (e.g., microbiome taxonomic tables, fecal metabolomic profiles) into cloud-based data warehouses.

- Cross-Functional Support & Trial Enablement

• Study design advisory: Partner with research scientists (Palatability, Food Processing, Healthy & Sick Pet Nutrition) during the trial design phase to establish data collection standards and case report forms, ensuring downstream analyses are seamlessly executed and easy re-use in future trials.
• User training: Train and support researchers, clinical coordinators, and external partners on utilizing EDC systems, electronic lab notebooks, and standard data upload procedures.

- Scientific Image & Continuous Improvement

• Industry Benchmarking: Stay up to date on emerging technologies, database engines, and clinical data standard frameworks ( such as CDISC schemas) to continuously modernize Royal Canin's R&D data infrastructure.

What can you expect from Mars ?

• You will work in a multicultural environment (more than 40 nationalities) and where your dog will be welcomed by more than 100 other Associates’ dogs at the office!

• You will work in a unique campus, which gathers more than 800 Associates working for: the international HQ, the French subsidiary, two laboratories, a kennel and a cattery with more than 200 cats & dogs, and finally the most important factory of the Royal Canin group

• A unique and ideal work environment to become the leader in health through nutrition for cats and dogs!

• You will evolve in the heart of an innovative production plant that will challenge you, on a daily basis

Royal Canin's CSR commitments, to build a better world for tomorrow:

• Since 2015, no waste to landfill is made by the 16 Royal Canin factories in the world

• All Royal Canin products manufactured in Europe are ISO 14001 certified from design to factory gate

• Since 2017, Royal Canin has supported the K-DOG program of the Curie Institute, which trains dogs to detect breast cancer via olfaction.