Head of Manufacturing Engineering

TAR•San Francisco, CA

5d•Onsite

About The Position

TAR builds its own construction robots to install its proprietary racking at gigawatt scale, and building those machines at rate is its own engineering discipline. As the fleet grows from prototypes to production across multiple robot programs, manufacturing engineering becomes the constraint on how fast TAR can put working machines in the field. As Head of Manufacturing Engineering, you own that discipline company-wide. You take TAR from single-line, hands-on builds to a manufacturing engineering organization with the standards, quality systems, and capital and capacity planning to scale from low-rate production to reliable, higher-volume manufacturing across every program. This is a senior leadership seat, based at our San Francisco robotics facility.

Requirements

10+ years of manufacturing engineering experience, including 5+ years in a leadership role (Director, Head of, or VP level) building and running a manufacturing engineering organization, not a single line.
Demonstrated experience scaling manufacturing engineering across multiple product lines, programs, or sites, beyond standing up one assembly line.
Track record owning capital equipment planning and budget for manufacturing scale-up, including make-versus-buy and contract manufacturer decisions at a strategic level.
Experience building and leading a team of manufacturing engineers and engineering leads, including hiring and developing people managers.
Deep expertise across the manufacturing value chain: DFM, tooling, process development, and quality systems, with the ability to set standards other engineers execute against.
Strong communication skills, comfortable representing manufacturing engineering decisions to executive leadership, customers, and investors.

Nice To Haves

Experience manufacturing hardware for austere, field, or defense-adjacent environments.
Experience scaling manufacturing engineering at a high-growth, venture-backed hardware or robotics company, such as Anduril, SpaceX, or Tesla.
Familiarity with formal quality systems (ISO, AS9100) applied at an organizational rather than single-line level.
Experience standing up a manufacturing engineering function from its first hire, including building out the managers and leads beneath you.

Responsibilities

Define and own the manufacturing engineering strategy and roadmap across TAR's robotics product lines, aligning capacity, tooling, and process investment with the company's scaling plans.
Build and lead the manufacturing engineering organization, hiring, structuring, and developing engineers and engineering leads as the function grows beyond a single line.
Own capital equipment and capacity planning, forecasting the headcount, tooling, and facility investment needed to scale from prototype and low-rate production to reliable, higher-volume manufacturing across multiple programs.
Set the manufacturing engineering standards, quality systems, and documentation practices that apply company-wide, so every product line meets the same bar for austere-environment reliability instead of reinventing process line by line.
Own supplier and contract manufacturer strategy at the organizational level, setting the criteria by which manufacturing partners are selected, negotiated with, and held accountable.
Establish company-wide root-cause and continuous-improvement processes so lessons from any single line or product feed back into how every future line is built.
Serve as the senior manufacturing engineering voice on the leadership team, shaping investment decisions, make-versus-buy trade-offs, and production timelines with engineering, supply chain, and executive leadership.
Represent manufacturing engineering externally with customers, partners, and investors when technical and operational credibility earns trust.