Lead Production & Manufacturing Engineer

Lead Production & Manufacturing Engineer
Water Robotics · Hyderabad, India · Onsite · Full-time
We build adaptive robots you live with (waterobots.com). Robots that are out of prototype and going into production. We need someone to build and lead the manufacturing team for these robots.
What you'll own
Manufacturability. You will work closely with the design team on DFM and DFA, fixtures, jigs and poka-yoke, and help draft manufacturing drawings as needed.
The build plan. Process flow, batch sizing, procurement coordination with the operations team, scheduling, material readiness, throughput, cycle time. You commit to dates for finished units and you hit them.
The facility. You design it. Layout, material flow, workstations, assembly and test benches, tooling, storage and traceability for a BOM that runs into the hundreds of SKUs. You decide what the floor looks like and why.
The team. Around eight people to start: assembly technicians, junior QC engineers, stores and inventory. You write the roles, run the hiring, train them, and set the standard. Everyone on that floor reports to you.
Quality. Incoming inspection, in-process checks, first-article, end-of-line functional test on a machine with dozens of moving axes. Rejection tracking that tells us something. Supplier corrective action when a vendor drifts.
Faults. When a unit fails on the line or comes back from the field, you run the root cause to ground and close the loop with design through an ECR. You are the person who knows why it broke.
What we're looking for
You have taken an electromechanical product from engineering release through industrialisation to serial production, and stayed with it after launch. Motors, actuators, harnesses, sensors and structures assembled and tested together.
You have run a shop floor and managed the people on it. Hiring, training, shift planning, holding a line.
You have set up a line or a facility from scratch, or substantially rebuilt one.
Strong working knowledge of the processes that make our parts: laser cutting, bending and sheet metal, welding and weld fixturing, machining, moulding, surface finishing, fastening and joining. You know what each one can hold, what it costs, and where it goes wrong.
You can specify, build and integrate electrical harnesses into a moving assembly: routing through articulating joints, strain relief and flex life, connector and crimp selection, labelling, continuity and hipot testing.
Real fluency in production planning, BOM and ECN/ECR discipline, PFMEA, root cause, GD&T, vendor development.
6+ years, with time in operations rather than design alone.
Nice to have
Electronics content in the assembly: board handling, ESD control, functional test rigs.
High-mix, low-volume or small-batch manufacturing.
Time in a startup or a small unit where you did the whole job yourself, including the parts nobody assigned you.
SolidWorks and PDM.
Why this one
Most production roles hand you a frozen product and a line that already runs. This one hands you an empty building and a robot nobody has built at volume yet. What gets built here is yours, down to the production line.

Work arrangement
No