Operation Excellence Coordinator

About the role

Podium Automation is reimagining industrial control panel manufacturing through software‑enabled design and automated fabrication. We're building technology to create a new industrial supply chain—reducing lead times for critical electrical equipment from months to days. As Operations Excellence Coordinator, you will be the connective tissue between our product/engineering work and day‑to‑day operations on the floor. Reporting to the General Manager of Operations (Brooklyn), you will own training, process consistency, and continuous improvement, giving leadership confidence that change management on the floor has dedicated ownership.

Responsibilities

• Training & Enablement: Own continuous training and retraining for the team, especially on software tools and systems (e.g., setting up barcode scanners for inventory tracking, executing correct tasks in our internal Task Execution System, and rolling out new features). Serve as the first line of problem resolution for “how to do X” workflow edge cases (e.g., investigating and resolving missing parts in Odoo pick lists). Build and maintain training materials that keep pace with evolving tools and workflows, such as on‑demand video tutorials available in Slack or Drive.
• Process Improvement & Experimentation: Work with the team to surface, prioritize, and drive process improvement initiatives (e.g., optimizing station organization, backplane storage, and station ergonomics). Design and run lightweight experiments, such as time studies for bottleneck tasks or station design comparisons, to validate whether proposed changes are actual improvements. Help scope new initiatives and route feedback to the right people, acting as the daily “eyes and ears” on the ground to close the loop on floor issues across sites.
• SOP & Standards Management: Ensure accessibility and dissemination of SOPs by implementing right‑place, right‑time process cues, signage, kanban cards, and visual labeling at stations. Guarantee consistency of process and standards across multiple sites, ensuring that an improvement at Site A is successfully implemented at Site B. Support General Managers with tools and training, including documentation of spatial designs and station organization to allow new GMs to “copy‑paste” configurations. Conduct quarterly site reviews and audits as a champion for cross‑site consistency.
• Change Management: Be the voice of management to drive cultural change from the bottom up, building a lean‑practice culture, providing feedback forums, and facilitating Kaizen events. Take in floor feedback, iterate, and push process changes where they’ll have the most impact, while finding creative ways to celebrate and elevate task completion.

Requirements

• 0–3 years of experience; highly open to strong early‑career candidates.
• Naturally organized with strong systems‑thinking capabilities.
• Background or coursework in design thinking (industrial design, visual/UX design, or design‑thinking methods within an engineering background).
• Comfort creating structure and concrete next steps out of ambiguous situations.
• Interest in or exposure to product or process development.
• Self‑motivated with a strong bias toward action.

Our Values

• Win for the customer: We sit on the same side of the table as our customers—their wins are our wins.
• Default to transparency: We believe in honesty, transparency, and kindness.
• Speed is a feature: We move fast and take ownership. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
• Win and lose as a team: Individuals drive inputs, teams drive outputs. We celebrate success together but aren’t afraid to fail and iterate.

Compensation

Compensation Range: $60K – $70K