Head of Deployments – Process Manufacturing AI (PLC, SCADA, MES)

Boston, USA. On-site five days a week. Up to $200k plus equity. 25% to 50% travel.

“It is possible to fly without motors, but not without knowledge and skill.” Wilbur Wright, 1901. The machine was never the hard part. Flying it was.

The role in three points

1. You own getting the technology live. Every installation, every plant, every country. Delivery is the constraint on this business right now and it becomes yours on day one.
2. You build the team that does it. A small field engineering group that needs to roughly triple over the next quarter, hired in the US and overseas, coached by you rather than by a handbook.
3. You turn deployment into a commercial function. Metrics, forecasting, capacity planning, and services that get paid for rather than given away to close deals.

The company

A venture-backed industrial AI business working in process manufacturing, where product moves as a continuous flow through pipes, tanks and reactors rather than being assembled from parts. Its proprietary technology sits inside live production lines and reads what is happening inside the process in real time, something these plants have always run blind on. The output is less downtime, less waste, and far less dead time between product runs. On a large site, taking minutes out of every line changeover recovers serious capacity without any new capital equipment.

This is not early-stage theory. The technology is already deployed across hundreds of plants on six continents and is relied on by several of the largest manufacturers in its sector, the sort of household names whose products sit in most kitchens on earth. Commercial demand is comfortably ahead of what delivery can currently absorb, which is the exact reason this role exists.

The team is around fifty people and the structure is flat. Decisions sit with whoever is closest to the problem, and the expectation is that you arrive with a recommendation rather than an escalation. You get real autonomy and the resources to act on your own judgement. It suits people who enjoy unforgiving engineering environments, where equipment has to run for years untouched and nothing clever counts for anything if it fails on a night shift.

What you will actually be doing

• Resetting team priorities every week as the picture changes, deciding who goes where, and stepping in yourself when a site goes sideways
• Finding rollouts that have stalled anywhere in the world and getting them moving again, including the uncomfortable customer calls with sales in the room
• Walking prospects through the delivery model before contracts are signed, then expanding from a first site into the rest of their network
• Hiring field engineers, then developing them properly with real-time feedback and debriefs after every site visit
• Owning the deployment metrics, forecast and capacity plan with the founders, and carrying what you learn in the field back into the product roadmap

What you must have

Every one of these is being assessed. If one is missing, the application will not get through.

• Implementations owned from kickoff through to go-live deploying industrial automation on manufacturing shop floors. PLCs, SCADA, HMIs, MES and historians. This is the single most common reason strong candidates are declined, and enterprise software delivery does not substitute for it.
• Hands-on deployment of technology on customer shop floors, and ownership of complex multi-site or global enterprise rollouts. You were physically on the floor, and you then carried a rollout across many sites and more than one country.
• Experience building and leading a forward deployed engineering, professional services, field engineering or implementation team. Hiring, coaching, performance managing and keeping good field people.
• Five to twenty years as a deployment, professional services or field engineering leader at an industrial automation or manufacturing software company. Think businesses in the mould of Locus Robotics or Cognex.
• A background in industrial automation, robotics or process manufacturing. CPG, chemicals, and food and beverage all read strongly.
• Customer obsession you can evidence. Not a value statement. Specific examples: the account you rescued, the plant manager who still has your number, the weekend you spent on site because it mattered.
• Genuine range with people. You can hold a hard conversation with a frustrated customer in the morning and coach a junior engineer through a failed commissioning that afternoon. Mentoring is a real part of this job, not an overhead.
• Ability and willingness to travel 25% to 50%, including international travel to customer sites. It will sit at the heavier end early on.
• Based in Boston, or genuinely willing to relocate there. Five days a week on-site, with relocation support available.

A bachelor’s degree in electrical, chemical, mechanical, industrial or manufacturing engineering is preferred.

If you have also turned services into a priced revenue line, built a third-party systems integrator partner model, or scaled an early team from one or two people to ten or more, lead with it. Any one of those puts you well ahead of the field.

Where strong candidates usually come from

The best fits tend to come from venture-backed industrial AI and robotics companies that put hardware into live plants, the process equipment world where plant cleaning cycles and changeovers are everyday language, inline analytics and instrumentation makers, the automation and manufacturing software majors, systems integrators where delivery leads own the full control stack from kickoff to handover, or automation and digital manufacturing leads inside large manufacturers who still have real time on the floor behind them.

Who it will not suit

Anyone who raises problems without bringing options. Anyone whose recent years have been org charts and quarterly reviews with no field time, because this leader still gets on planes. Software delivery leaders whose implementations never touched a control system. Anyone who needs visa sponsorship, as this is open to US citizens and Green Card holders only. And anyone who cannot be on-site in Boston five days a week, since hybrid has already been ruled out.

Package and process

Up to $200k plus equity, with relocation support for the right person. Three interview stages, including a half day on-site with the founders. The team is working to 24 hour decisions and 48 hour feedback, so this moves quickly.

If you have run deployments inside heavy industry and have been waiting for something where the technology is genuinely new, the customers are already the biggest names in their category, and the team is yours to build, apply below.