Director of Manufacturing

About the role

Someone has to own what happens on the shop floor — the safety, the quality, the schedule, and the people who make it all happen. Rheo Engineering designs and builds engineer-to-order and standardized process equipment for the pharmaceutical industry — equipment used in the direct manufacture of life-saving medicine. Our Equipment division is scaling fast, and our fabrication, assembly, and integration floor needs to scale with it. We're looking for a Director of Manufacturing to own that floor — safety, quality, on-time delivery, and the skilled-trades workforce behind it all — reporting directly to our COO.

Responsibilities

• Supervisory: Lead, develop, and hold accountable shop-floor supervisors, leads, and trades teams — building a strong frontline leadership bench to support scaling
• Coach teams in structured problem-solving and lean methods (e.g., 5S, kaizen) to eliminate waste and improve flow
• Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement where every team member is empowered to surface problems and improve the process
• Partner with HR on hiring, onboarding, training, performance management, and workforce development for a growing trades organization
• Lead change management so new processes, layouts, equipment, and systems are adopted effectively and sustainably
• Champion a zero-injury safety culture on the manufacturing floor — machine guarding, lockout/tagout, ergonomics, hot-work, and PPE compliance
• Ensure builds meet engineering specs, drawings, and applicable codes (e.g., ASME BPE), along with the cGMP-aligned documentation and material traceability pharmaceutical customers require, partnering with Quality on first-pass acceptance and audit readiness
• Own daily and weekly shop-floor execution — fabrication, assembly, integration, and factory acceptance testing — to hit build milestones, ship dates, and customer witness events
• Translate project schedules and engineering releases into production plans and shop loading across concurrent engineer-to-order projects, managing constraints and driving recovery plans when delivery is at risk
• Build and execute a manufacturing capacity plan that scales fabrication, assembly, and integration ahead of demand
• Lead skilled-trades workforce planning — welders, fabricators, assemblers, and technicians — including hiring, cross-training, certification, and flexible labor strategies to grow capability without diluting quality
• Partner with the COO on data-driven capacity and headcount modeling, and identify the capital equipment, tooling, and floor-space investments needed to expand throughput
• Define and own manufacturing KPIs — on-time delivery, first-pass yield, labor utilization, safety, and rework — and drive root-cause analysis and corrective action when targets are missed
• Manage manufacturing labor cost and utilization against project estimates, protecting Equipment-division margin as volume scales
• Partner with Engineering, Project Management, and Supply Chain to keep designs manufacturable, schedules on track, and materials available
• Establish standard operating rhythms (daily huddles, tiered production reviews) so execution is consistent and coordinated across the floor
• Serve as the manufacturing point of accountability for Quality and customer witness / factory acceptance events

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree preferred, in engineering, manufacturing, industrial, or operations
• 5+ years of progressive manufacturing leadership experience, including direct responsibility for shop-floor operations in an engineer-to-order, custom-equipment, or fabrication and assembly environment
• Demonstrated success scaling manufacturing capacity and a skilled-trades workforce to meet growing demand
• Track record of delivering complex builds on time, on quality, and on cost in a low-volume, high-mix setting

Qualifications

• Experience in pharmaceutical, biotech, or other regulated process-equipment manufacturing (preferred)
• Familiarity with ASME BPE, c