Technical Manager, Manufacturing (Process & Quality)

InventWood makes SUPERWOOD, which presents an extraordinary opportunity to enable new products across a range of industries and applications. These include mass timber, cladding, decking, railings, fencing, flooring, other building materials, transportation, etc. With hardness and performance that can literally be bulletproof, the material also has military applications. We are currently scaling up our first-of-breed plant, SUPERMILL ONE, in Frederick, Maryland.

Position Overview

The Technical Manager is the primary technical owner of production at SUPERMILL ONE — responsible for product recipes, process settings, quality performance, process data, and the trial program that drives all of it forward. Reporting to the Director of Manufacturing, the role exists to turn the plant into a learning organization: one that rapidly understands how process variables affect product quality in a real production environment, surfaces unexpected relationships among those variables, and continuously converts that learning into better yield, quality, and cost.

This is a first-of-its-kind plant. Standards are being written as the plant runs, equipment is being characterized in real conditions for the first time, and process parameters are being discovered rather than read out of a manual. Direction shifts as the team learns. The right person finds that energizing: a creative, disciplined problem solver with hands-on scale-up experience who is as comfortable on the production floor chasing a misaligned thermocouple as in a control chart, and who wants to make a tangible impact in sustainable materials manufacturing.

Process Control and Documentation

• Serve as the primary technical owner of all process settings and production recipes, and the point of contact for any requested change to a manufacturing process.
• Maintain a single authoritative settings register, with a change log capturing date, owner, rationale, and outcome for every change — such that any historical setting can be reconstructed on audit.
• Maintain current, version-controlled work instructions for every key operation, findable and demonstrably used on the floor.
• Build operator understanding of the why behind key settings, not just the what, so that shift-to-shift variation in process execution is measurably low and deviations are surfaced and corrected quickly.

Learning and Experimentation

• Own the production trial program directly — maintaining a visible, regularly updated trial plan prioritized against the areas of greatest uncertainty and highest impact.
• Direct the work of one to two trial technicians who support trial execution and measurement.
• Develop and approve trial plans in conjunction with R&D, product, and sales for product changes, machine efficiency tests, and major recipe adjustments — and ensure those partners can see their input reflected in the plan.
• Execute trials on cadence rather than deferring them; size trials for short concept-to-result cycle time, favorable cost per unit of learning, and findings that are actionable rather than merely interesting.
• Document predictions of trial outcomes before results are known, and share the reasoning so that others on the team build process intuition as well.

Quality Ownership

• Own product quality, resolving issues through upstream process change rather than added end-of-line inspection.
• Drive down defect escape rate to the customer alongside internal scrap and rework.
• Ensure every significant quality issue carries a documented root cause analysis with a verified cause, and a corrective action with a named owner, a due date, and verified effectiveness — issues should not recur after closure.
• Produce clear, accurate written explanations of cause and prevention for customer-facing quality incidents and for company leadership, within agreed timeframes.

Data, Instrumentation, and Alarms

• Own the production data. Surface surprising trends before others discover them, and translate findings into settings changes, trials, or upstream fixes.
• Make data review a standing, visible part of the plant rhythm rather than an after-the-fact exercise.
• Establish documented alarm thresholds with clear rationale for critical process variables, set to fire before defects are produced, with a false-alarm rate low enough that operators trust and act on them.
• Maintain and execute a prioritized pipeline of instrumentation and automated inspection improvements, working closely with engineering and operations, and ensure each new system delivers data that is actually used.

Variation Reduction

• Treat variation as the central lens on process performance — tracking key process parameters and product characteristics with SPC tools including control charts, capability studies, and capability indices (Cp/Cpk).
• Classify excursions as common cause or special cause and route each to the appropriate intervention.
• Maintain a Pareto of variation sources ranked by impact on the product, and target the trial plan explicitly at the top contributors.
• State variation-reduction targets alongside mean-shift targets in trial designs, and report before-and-after variation measures.
• Hold the gains: encode every successful intervention into updated settings, procedures, alarms, and training records, and confirm capability holds in the months that follow.

Cross-Functional Contribution

• Act as a key manufacturing interface with R&D, product development, and engineering on technical matters.
• Contribute rigorous plant-side analysis when the product team evaluates new concepts — covering manufacturability, cost, and quality implications, not feasibility alone.
• Support the technical evaluation of future machine technology, working closely with the capital projects, R&D, and engineering teams.
• Support accounting in ensuring that true manufacturing costs are reflected by SKU.
• Communicate yield, quality, throughput, and cost trends proactively.

Leadership and Safety

• Reinforce a bottom-up safety culture in which observations, near-miss reports, and peer interventions rise as awareness grows, and never trade safety for throughput.
• Be visibly present on the production floor and identifiably the person carrying the hardest technical problems to resolution.
• Stay constructive under pressure; ensure the team’s energy goes into solving problems.
• Draw ideas out of operators, engineers, and others — technical discussions should surface a range of voices
• Communicate priorities clearly so the team understands sequencing of technical work.

What Success Looks Like

When this role is succeeding, the plant operates as a learning system. Settings are documented, controlled, and consistent across shifts. Trials are designed for maximum learning at reasonable cost and run on a predictable cadence. Quality is built upstream rather than inspected at the end of the line. Variation in the parameters that matter is measured, understood, and shrinking. The product, R&D, and engineering teams trust the technical voice coming from the plant.

Qualifications

The ideal candidate pairs deep process and materials capability with the temperament to lead technically in an environment that is still being defined.

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Chemical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Materials Science, Industrial Engineering, or a related field.
• 8+ years of experience in process development, scale-up, or manufacturing innovation, with a track record of successful innovation across multiple prior engagements.
• Strong understanding of unit operations, process modeling, and industrial process design.
• Demonstrated command of statistical process control and designed experimentation — control charts, capability analysis, DOE, Lean/Six Sigma — applied to real production data, not coursework.
• Experience owning quality outcomes, including disciplined root cause analysis and corrective action systems with verified effectiveness.
• Hands-on experience in pilot plant or production environments, including standing up documentation, change control, and operator training.
• Familiarity with automation, instrumentation, and process control systems, and experience specifying or deploying new measurement capability.
• Experience in wood processing, composites, pulp and paper, and/or advanced materials is desirable.
• Ability to teach and coach — building process understanding in operators and shift leaders, and drawing problem-solving contributions out of the team.
• Comfort operating amid ambiguity, holding long-term goals steady through short-term disruption, and treating a well-reasoned pivot as progress rather than failure.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and written communication skills, with the ability to translate technical data into actionable insight for non-technical audiences including customers and company leadership.
• Experience with sustainable design principles and lifecycle analysis is a plus.
• Passion for sustainability, innovation, and new materials in the built environment.