Required qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in engineering, technical management, or related field OR equivalent combination of education, technical certifications, and relevant experience. 12+ years of relevant experience in manufacturing, engineering operations, or R&D infrastructure, including 5+ years in a leadership/people management role.
- Demonstrated success leading multi-disciplinary technical teams in a complex, high-consequence environment. with R&D laboratories, pilot plants, or advanced manufacturing strongly preferred.
- Proven ability to develop talent, build cohesive teams, and lead through change.
- Knowledge, Skills &.
- Abilities Deep knowledge of manufacturing engineering, industrialization practices, and process development including process characterization, qualification, validation, and readiness for scale.
- Strong understanding of production system design encompassing throughput analysis, capacity modeling, factory layout, workflow optimization, and technology selection.
- Demonstrated experience leading scale-up from prototype or pilot to full-rate production, including deployment of new manufacturing technologies, automation, and capital equipment.
- Skilled in long-range operations planning, including development of multi-year capability roadmaps and investment strategies for capacity, quality, and risk reduction.
About this role
The Director, Manufacturing Industrialization & Scaling leads the evolution of FHR manufacturing from today’s process development, and integrated demonstrations to full production readiness, ensuring scalability, reliability, and cost-effectiveness. This role coordinates the development of the long-term manufacturing roadmap including detailed make vs.
Responsibilities
- Owns the manufacturing industrialization strategy, driving the transition from R&D to scalable, reliable, and cost-effective manufacturing across facilities and product lines in collaboration with other manufacturing, engineering, and cross-functional leaders.
- Leads development and execution of the long-range manufacturing roadmap, and staged manufacturing scaling plan, consolidating stakeholder inputs to define manufacturing readiness, required capabilities, site and facility selection, workforce model, capital roadmap, technologies, and investments to support throughput growth, quality improvement, and risk reduction.
- Owns annual and multi-year Cap Ex/Op Ex planning for manufacturing, prioritizing investments aligned to key operational drivers including capacity, quality, cost, and risk mitigation.
- Develop and mature cost-tracking processes, cost models, and lifecycle production economics (prototype through optimized production) to improve cost visibility, forecasting, pricing strategy, and executive decision-making, and to drive cost-engineer feedback into design engineering teams, in collaboration with manufacturing, supply-chain, finance, and human resources leadership.
- Partners cross-functionally with engineering, operations, supply chain & procurement, finance, and quality innovation to define manufacturability requirements, integrate operating experience into manufacturing processes, and mature products and processes through each lifecycle phase.
- Improves schedule confidence by working with manufacturing integration and operations, planning, and shop leadership to understand bottlenecks in early production to inform engineering feedback and DFM processes that improve part manufacturability before higher-volume commitments.
- Collaborates with manufacturing leaders to establish advanced machining, fabrication, metrology, and material-prep, and test-cell capabilities early.
- Pilots critical processes and production technologies to mature process control, automation integration, cost structure and equipment utilization ahead of high-rate production, reducing risk to future facility investments.
- Foster a culture of operational excellence where safety, quality, and continuous improvement are foundational to scaling success.
- Provides leadership and direction to manufacturing staff responsible for developing and executing manufacturing growth plans, establishes performance expectations, coaches and mentors team members, and builds technical depth, adaptability, and engagement over time.
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