Manufacturing Engineer, Factory Design & Operations

About Framework

Framework is building fully automated apparel manufacturing facilities in the United States. By combining software, robotics, and industrial automation, we aim to make domestic apparel production cost-competitive with—and ultimately outperform—offshore manufacturing while dramatically reducing lead times and inventory costs for apparel brands.

The Opportunity

Design how people, materials, inventory, machines, and information move through the factory.

You will spend significant time on the factory floor studying how work actually happens, then redesign layouts, workstations, storage systems, and material flows to make the operation faster, simpler, and easier to scale.

What You’ll Do

• Design and continuously improve factory, warehouse, and production layouts.
• Observe operations directly and identify unnecessary movement, handling, waiting, and process steps.
• Conduct time studies and map the movement of people, materials, and inventory.
• Design workstations, storage locations, equipment arrangements, and material-handling paths.
• Create CAD layouts and compare alternative configurations before implementation.
• Determine whether a problem should be solved through layout, process, equipment, or automation.
• Plan and lead physical moves, equipment installations, and production-area rearrangements.
• Implement clear visual standards and fixed locations for tools, inventory, equipment, and work in progress.
• Measure whether completed changes improve throughput, labor requirements, storage capacity, and operating reliability.
• Work directly with manufacturing, mechanical, controls, robotics, and software teams.

What You’ll Bring

• Hands-on experience improving a factory, warehouse, production line, or other physical operation.
• Experience producing facility or equipment layouts in CAD.
• The ability to observe an operation, understand why it is inefficient, and implement a practical solution.
• Strong mechanical intuition and comfort working around industrial equipment.
• A willingness to spend significant time on the factory floor measuring, moving, testing, and adjusting.
• Strong planning, troubleshooting, and problem-solving skills.
• Clear written and verbal communication.

Preferred Experience

We are particularly interested in someone who:

• Has rearranged a live production area or warehouse while operations continued around them.
• Has followed a material or operator through an entire process, measured every movement, and redesigned the workflow based on what they observed.
• Has laid out a factory area in CAD, marked the locations on the floor, moved the equipment, and then operated the finished layout.
• Has designed and built a workstation, cart, rack, fixture, or storage system after seeing that the available commercial options did not fit the process.
• Has personally moved machines, assembled racking, labeled inventory locations, rerouted utilities, or solved other unglamorous details required to make a new layout work.
• Has discovered that a planned process failed once it reached the factory floor and changed it quickly rather than defending the original design.
• Has improved an operation through a simple physical change rather than immediately adding more software or expensive automation.
• Has supported an equipment installation or facility move where sequencing, access, utilities, inventory, and production downtime all had to be managed at once.
• Can describe a layout or process improvement they made, what went wrong during implementation, and how they corrected it.
• Is comfortable making a rough change in the morning, observing it during production, and rebuilding it that afternoon.

What We Offer

• Significant ownership over the design and improvement of Framework’s factories (many).
• Direct access to the factory floor, production equipment, and the teams operating the systems you design.
• The opportunity to work across manufacturing, robotics, controls, software, and mechanical engineering.
• A fast-paced environment where practical improvements can be designed, implemented, and tested quickly.
• Significant opportunities for increased responsibility as the company scales.