Director of Production Automation and Process Engineering

Hire Ventures•Los Alamitos, CA

About The Position

CI Solutions is expanding its production capacity and preparing to open a new production facility, including the addition of four to five automated UV digital printing systems. We currently have dedicated project management, production management, and engineering resources. This role will work alongside those teams, with a specific focus on production automation, systems integration, and scaling the operation from a single production line to multiple coordinated production units. The initial focus will be developing a complete understanding of the existing equipment and end-to-end production workflow. This leader will then define how the operation must change to support multiple production lines efficiently. They must understand the intricacies of moving from one line to many, including job routing, equipment utilization, shared resources, staffing, maintenance, quality control, production visibility, redundancy, and exception handling. The primary objective is to build a scalable and increasingly automated production model that can sustainably reduce standard lead times from approximately 20 business days to 7–10 business days without sacrificing print quality, personalization accuracy, data integrity, or service reliability.

Requirements

10+ years of progressive experience in print manufacturing, production automation, process engineering, or industrial operations.
Demonstrated experience scaling an operation from one production line to multiple coordinated lines or production units.
Experience designing automated workflows that connect data intake, production equipment, quality control, and fulfillment.
Direct experience with large-format, industrial, or high-volume UV digital printing.
Ability to translate business goals and operating constraints into technical equipment, software, facility, and staffing requirements.
Experience developing capacity models and business cases for equipment, automation, and facility investments.
Experience installing, commissioning, and completing acceptance testing for new production equipment.
Strong understanding of job routing, production scheduling, line balancing, bottleneck analysis, preventive maintenance, redundancy, and process control.
Experience working across production, engineering, software, project management, and executive leadership.

Responsibilities

Own the strategy for scaling CI Solutions production environment from a single-line workflow to multiple coordinated production units.
Clearly articulate the business case for production investments, including expected capacity, labor impact, throughput improvement, operating risk, cost, and return.
Define how jobs should be scheduled, routed, prioritized, balanced, and reassigned across multiple production units.
Design processes that prevent equipment expansion from creating additional manual handoffs, disconnected workflows, or new production bottlenecks.
Determine which production functions should be centralized, and which should be managed at the individual line level.
Establish a scalable operating model for shared resources such as data preparation, prepress, quality control, maintenance, material handling, packaging, and shipping.
Automate data validation, personalization setup, job creation, proofing, production release, job routing, inspection, reconciliation, sorting, labeling, and reporting wherever practical.
Define the software, integration, and reporting capabilities required to manage multiple production lines.
Partner with engineering and software teams to translate production needs into clear system requirements and prioritized development work.
Lead the planning and operational launch of the new production facility.
Support the installation, commissioning, acceptance testing, and production ramp-up of 4-5 additional automated UV digital printing systems.
Validate that the facility’s electrical service, environmental controls, ventilation, networking, equipment layout, material flow, safety systems, and supporting infrastructure meet the needs of a multi-line production operation.
Develop standards for equipment configuration, calibration, UV curing, ink adhesion, color consistency, registration, white-ink applications, preventive maintenance, and changeovers.
Design the production environment for resilience so that equipment maintenance or failure does not unnecessarily stop the entire operation.
Establish measurable standards for cycle time, throughput, equipment utilization, uptime, work in progress, spoilage, rework, labor efficiency, personalization accuracy, and on-time completion.
Work closely with production management on execution while maintaining ownership of automation, process design, capacity planning, and scalable production architecture.