SeniorManufacturingEngineer

WindBorne is an atypical hardware company insomuch as we sell the data produced by our balloons rather than the balloons ourselves. Because of this, we have a very tight loop between engineering and our customers (our own internal operations), and so can push design changes to the field on the order of once per week while simultaneously scaling production. Right now, every part of that process is owned by a team of full-stack engineers, each of whom designs a part, owns its tooling, and makes tweaks to improve performance in the field. This has worked thus far but won’t scale because the load of caring about manufacturing throughput and tooling maintenance has grown large enough that it cannot coexist with design iterations. We’re hiring our first manufacturing engineer (you) to change that. WindBorne’s manufacturing is a manual-to-semi-automated environment built around delicate hand assembly (soft goods, heat-sealed plastics, and light soldering). You will enter WindBorne as the first manufacturing engineer in the company, owning the manufacturing engineering for parts as they come off the design team and introducing automations that improve the speed and reliability of processes. You’ll start as the sole manufacturing engineer, but we expect you to hire and lead a team under you in the first year. You'll report to our COO as part of operations, take technical direction from our CTO, and sit as a peer to our design engineering leaders. This is an atypical position: most hardware isn’t at design lock, but we produce it at volume (currently 1,000 units a month, doubling every six months). We need someone to make decisions on which parts of a design are stable enough to tool up and document, and which need to stay flexible, as well as the engineering rigor to build repeatable, sustainable production around a moving target. If that seems exciting, this job might be for you. CORE RESPONSIBILITIES - Own manufacturing engineering for parts as they transition off the desi