Designation: VP/SVP - Reports to: Co-founder & COO - Level: Leadership

A Physical AI company building AI-powered sorting, grading, and packing machines for fresh produce, with deployments across India and international markets, serving fruit packers, quick-commerce retailers, and global channel partners.

The company is scaling from build-to-order, partner-led manufacturing toward a repeatable, quality-certified production system that meets international fruit-packing and retail-automation standards.

We are looking for a Head of Manufacturing to lead the entire manufacturing function, including internal production capabilities, external manufacturing partner networks, and robust safety and quality systems to support reliable deployments across global markets.

What You'll Own:

- Plant/system-level problem-solving: Trace defects, yield loss, and downtime across our full commodity/machine-type portfolio (Sort, Pack, tray-packing robots) back to shared root causes in material flow, information flow, or supplier quality - and fix them at the source, not just on the machine in front of you.

- The manufacturing roadmap: Decide which lines, machine types, and quality investments are worth building this quarter, and which aren't. Own the build-vs-partner call for each machine type and geography.

- Safety and quality as a system, not a checklist: Own plant-level QA/QC audit cadence, stop-the-line authority, and defect-recurrence prevention across shifts and machine lines - to the standard our international fruit-packer and retail customers expect, not just domestic compliance minimums.

- Vendor ecosystem maturity: Move our manufacturing partners from transactional (reliable delivery on committed orders) toward genuine capability partners, and eventually toward a dual-sourced, resilient network so no single vendor or component delay can stall a customer deployment.

- Capability building: Install standard work, training pathways, and problem-solving methodology so the shop floor gets better without you in the room.

- Culture: Build overall safety as the cultural default, with the psychological safety to stop the line without fear, and make near-miss/defect reporting blameless - so problem-solving becomes a daily habit across shifts rather than something enforced from the top.

- Working capital discipline: Partner with finance/ops on milestone-based procurement and vendor payment structuring (advance / delivery / post-installation) to reduce blocked cash per unit.

What Good Looks Like (Experience Needed in priority):

- Execution: Thrives in ambiguity with high agency - gets things done in a fast-scaling manufacturing environment.

- Leadership style: A flexible, outcome-oriented leadership style, adapting the approach to the problem rather than running a fixed playbook.

- Development & engagement: People want to work for you, and you actively build your team's capability and engagement.

- Team building: A track record of building manufacturing teams at scale.

- Safety system implementation: Your countermeasures hold via standard work and poka-yoke - not because someone's watching.

- Vendor management: Vendors treat Company as a partner worth prioritizing, not just another PO.

- Process improvement: Handed "yield is down 8% on the Sort line" or "the Q-Com rollout needs 150 - 200 units by 2028," you run it end-to-end without hand-holding.

- Shop-floor behavior: Near-miss and defect reporting on your floor is blameless; people flag problems instead of hiding them.

- Quality management: You can look a European fruit-packer's or a Reliance/BigBasket-scale retailer's quality audit in the eye without flinching.

What You Bring:

- 10+ years in manufacturing engineering/operations, with at least 3 - 5 years owning plant-level or multi-line scope (not just machine-level fixes).

- Track record building or scaling a vendor/supplier network - ideally in precision machinery, industrial automation, or electromechanical assembly.

- Direct experience with safety/quality systems (root-cause analysis, poka-yoke, audit cadence) at a level that satisfies export-quality or international customer standards.

- Comfort operating in a startup environment: build-to-order variability, partner-led manufacturing, and capital-constrained scaling - not a mature, single-site mass-production setup.

- Bonus: exposure to food-tech/agri-tech hardware, sorting/grading/vision-based machinery, or cold-chain/produce industry.

Why This Role Matters Now:

We are moving from proving the technology to proving it can be built and deployed at scale - India SaaS fleet expansion, India Capex build-to-order lines, ~150 - 200 Q-Com units through 2028, and international partner-led deployments. Manufacturing quality and vendor reliability are now the constraint on growth, not the AI. This role sets that foundation.