Head of Lean Six Sigma

Squint•San Francisco, CA

2d•$170,000 - $300,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Squint is building the AI agent that makes continuous improvement truly continuous. Record 18 minutes of a changeover on a phone and, without a word of narration, our Lean Manufacturing Agent hands back a complete time and motion study: every segment of work identified, classified against all seven forms of waste, and broken out into a work instruction. That used to take a consultant, a stopwatch, and several weeks. Nothing has been able to do this before. It's the result of breakthroughs we've made in vision language models, and a world-class engineering team that is still pushing the frontier. The technology is now ahead of the industry's ability to use it. Some of our customers are sophisticated operations with process engineers and mature Lean Six Sigma practices, and they want the sharpest tool on the market. Many more are seeing this capability for the first time, and a power tool is only as good as the hands holding it: without an experienced practitioner's judgment, they'll point the camera at the wrong process and run payback math on the wrong number. Our vision is to build that judgment into the product, so that picking up Squint is as simple as a consumer app: it surveys your factory and asks the right questions, identifies the bottleneck, measures and analyzes the process as it runs today, drafts the improvement plan, and hands you a fully configured Squint to hold the gains through training, troubleshooting, and SOPs. Shaping that future of industrial AI takes someone who knows how a factory actually gets fixed and can teach it to our customers and our own teams alike. Right now, nobody at Squint owns that across how product decides what to build, how sales qualifies a plant, how marketing describes us, and how we deliver once the contract is signed. We're hiring a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt to be that person. You'll report directly to the CEO, and your week goes wherever the highest-leverage problem is: teaching the sales team to find a bottleneck in a 30-minute discovery call, sitting with engineers to annotate gold-standard time studies, or flying to a customer site to run the workshop yourself. You've fixed factories, not just visited them, and you want to turn that expertise into something a product can eventually do on its own.

Requirements

Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt certification.
Roughly 6 to 10 years inside manufacturing operations, or consulting to manufacturers where you owned the outcome rather than the recommendation. Enough time on the floor to have seen most of what can go wrong.
At least one transformation you led that you can walk us through end to end, with the numbers.
Daily, hands-on use of AI tools in your own work.
Based in San Francisco or willing to relocate, with frequent travel to customer sites.

Nice To Haves

You've transformed factories before, and you're excited to do it across every industry Squint serves. Your track record is written in throughput, scrap, changeover minutes, or inventory turns, and you can tell the story behind each number. Now you want to bring that rigor to food and beverage, automotive, tires, heavy equipment, paper and packaging, energy, and life sciences, sometimes all in the same week.
You think like an operator. You hold a Black Belt and you still use it. You are not a program manager who picked up the vocabulary.
You'd be our toughest critic, and you want to build it anyway. You'll spot what our time studies get wrong before anyone else in the room, and you'd rather fix it than write a memo about it.
You're already automating your own job. You use AI tools every day, you're impatient with how slowly the industry adopts them, and you believe this work is going to be automated. You want to be the one doing the automating.
You're fast. You move comfortably between a plant floor and an engineering standup, and you keep pace with both.
You want to build, not advise. A role that looks different in three months is what you're looking for, not something you'd tolerate.

Responsibilities

Define how the world will manufacture with AI. Build the playbook that applies Lean Six Sigma rigor to any customer, in any industry, facing any situation: a discovery process that diagnoses the current state, helps Squint identify the plant's bottleneck, and delivers measurable value at first use, before pricing ever comes up. The processes and playbooks you author become the standard our sales, deployment, and product teams operate by.
With sales: build the go-to-market playbook for AI on the factory floor. Join pre-sales conversations alongside our sales team and build the process that lets us reliably understand a factory's bottleneck, choose the right use case, and speak the customer's language from the first call. Teach the team to recognize whether they're talking to a mature continuous improvement organization or a plant seeing this for the first time, and how to bring a first-of-its-kind product onto the floor with the operators who will run it.
With deployment: make pilots pay off. What we build has to do more than sell; it has to make factories measurably more efficient. Work inside live customer pilots, learn what works and what doesn't, and build the playbook our deployment team uses to reliably turn any pilot into delivered improvement.
With engineering and product: be the operator in the room. Sit with our engineers several times a week to work through real use cases, annotate gold-standard time studies, build the evaluation sets our models are graded against, and shape what gets built for each customer segment. Travel with the team to flagship customer engagements.
With marketing: be the industry voice. Serve as the resident manufacturing expert behind our copy, product marketing, and webinars, and represent Squint on conference stages.

Benefits

Competitive Salary and Equity
Comprehensive Medical, Vision, and Dental care
Flexible PTO Policy
Wellness Benefit
Maven Family Planning Benefits
Mental Health Services
401(k) Retirement Plan
Company-wide Retreats
Subsidized Uber to and from the office
Lunch and dinner provided daily, as well as delicious snacks and soft beverages to keep you energized