Engineering Manager

Palermo Rhodes•Lafayette, CO

1d•$130,000 - $150,000•Onsite

About The Position

Our client is an ultra-high-end architectural millwork company with projects ranging from $2M to $9M in the country's most elite mountain resort markets — Aspen, Jackson Hole, Telluride, and Big Sky among them. Established for decades and based between Denver and Boulder, the company operates a large, modern facility with state-of-the-art machinery, in-house veneer and finishing departments, and dedicated installation crews. The work spans complex staircases, paneling, custom cabinetry, closets, wine rooms, doors, and specialty furniture for some of the most elite homes in the country — and in these markets, millwork is typically the single largest subcontracted scope on the project. The company is the craft flagship of a three-company manufacturing platform in a sustained growth phase. The platform runs on EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System), and its growth goal is explicitly a people goal: developing exceptional leaders is treated as the binding constraint on growth, and this role is part of that investment. The Director of Engineering owns both of the company's engineering functions — Design Engineering (drafting and submittals through field dimensioning) and Production Engineering (releasing data to the shop floor) — leading a team of roughly 10 plus offshore drafting partners. This is a people-and-process leadership seat, not a drafting-table role. Success here is measured by how well the team performs: scheduling engineering resources against a large and growing backlog, holding a quality standard across internal and offshore work, and developing the engineers themselves. You don't need to be the deepest technical expert in the room — you need to lead the people who are. You won't be handed a department and told to figure it out. The outgoing engineering leader remains with the company and serves as an active co-pilot through a structured, phased onboarding — Design Engineering ownership first, with Production Engineering oversight layering in over the following months.

Requirements

Proven experience leading a drafting or engineering team in architectural millwork, custom cabinetry, or comparable complex manufacturing (high-end architectural metalwork and similar craft-adjacent industries translate well).
You have led a team of at least five drafters, designers, or engineers inside a shop or manufacturer of meaningful scale, so a ten-person department plus offshore partners is a step, not a leap.
A genuine people leader: you get energy from developing engineers, resolving conflict, and holding a standard — not just from the technical work itself.
Humility and curiosity. This work is highly complex, and the leaders who thrive here show up wanting to understand the whole system, not proving they already know it.
Experience managing outsourced or offshore drafting resources is a strong plus.
Working fluency — or a clear appetite to build it — with AutoCAD, Microvellum, and ERP-driven scheduling (INNERGY). Familiarity with point cloud / laser scanning workflows is a plus.
Passion for the product. This level of craft can't be led by someone who only loves the process.
No degree required — real-world experience carries more weight here than credentials.

Responsibilities

Team leadership and development. Lead, schedule, and develop the internal DE and PE teams — standing 1:1s, daily/weekly queue reviews, scorecard oversight, and annual reviews.
The submittal process. Own the initial drawing submittal process — broad-scope suite drawings (ceiling and wall elements, cabinetry, doors) through client approval — and the detail book that turns approved submittals into a reusable standard.
Offshore resource management. Run scheduling and quality oversight for outsourced offshore drafting teams, including annotating architect/designer drawings against the detail book before release.
Engineering scheduling. Sequence DE and PE work in INNERGY (millwork ERP) against shop capacity, managing the 2–3 month submittal-to-release buffer around production bottlenecks.
Field dimensioning. Own scheduling of the Faro point cloud scanner across active projects and the internal workflow for correcting drawings to field dimensions.
Quality systems. Stand up and run a Lead Engineer program for cross-project QC and consistency, and drive completion of the new Microvellum library implementation.
Cross-functional rhythm. Run EOS Level 10 meetings for the engineering team, co-lead the semi-weekly DE/PE scheduling meeting with the PM team, and represent engineering in production meetings — including long-range bottleneck forecasting.