Production Engineer

Manufacturing Production Engineer

Updated after the 29 Sep in-person intake.

Priority: Not a P0, but on 29 Sep the client asked AP to take this role now alongside the recruiter search. Production profiles may surface faster than the P0 engineers, so send strong ones as they come. Still not posted. AP is already recruiting manufacturing, process, and technician roles on other accounts, so we can catch these opportunistically.

The mandate: Ben described this person as a "dynamo between quality and process." Their job is to take a prototype and make it something that scales and that new technicians can learn fast.

What they do:

• Design for manufacturability audits. Review the engineers' designs and push back when they've ignored how something gets built. This needs someone with a track record of telling an engineering team what they missed and offering concrete fixes.
• Floor time. Go watch a live operation, time it with a stopwatch (takt time), take notes on the process as executed, and suggest changes to the team.
• SOPs and documentation. Write standard operating procedures and process documentation with photos and clear instructions, then keep refining them. Nobody likes writing documentation; this person has to.
• Technician training loop. Hand the instructions to a new technician, watch what they miss, gather feedback from the technician team, and revise.
• Ramp to serial production. Build the process that takes in-house manufacturing from one-off builds to production. This matters more as battery systems and fabrication move in house. The team is already welding and fabricating on site.

What good looks like: No required plant size or volume. They need demonstrated excellence on at least one real project and evidence they know how to win. Ben's model is Tesla: "you're taking 7 minutes to install body panel clips on the Model Y, you have 2 minutes, go figure it out." Creative, pressure-tested line problem solvers. Smaller company, many-hats experience is ideal.

Hours: Monday through Friday plus individual weekend work. Not a 40-hour role.

Sourcing notes: Target manufacturing, production, and process engineers from Tesla-style high-rate lines who genuinely like process work. In screens, ask for a specific cycle time they cut, how they measured it, and an SOP they wrote that a new hire actually used. [Get Ben's written bullets and confirm reporting line.]