Operation Excellence Coordinator

Podium Automation•New York, NY

7d•$60,000 - $70,000

About The Position

Podium Automation is reimagining industrial control panel manufacturing through software-enabled design and automated fabrication. We're building technology to create a new industrial supply chain - reducing lead times for critical electrical equipment from months to days. As Operations Excellence Coordinator, you will be the connective tissue between our product/engineering work and day-to-day operations on the floor. Reporting to the General Manager of Operations (Brooklyn), this person will own training, process consistency, and continuous improvement. You will give leadership the confidence that there's dedicated ownership of change management on the floor. This should be someone who can absorb feedback, run experiments to validate improvements, and push consistent process across sites, freeing up leadership time to focus on core engineering and design priorities. You'll thrive in ambiguity, naturally organize chaos into clear processes, and act as a driving force for change management across the team.

Requirements

0–3 years of experience; we are highly open to strong early-career candidates.
Naturally organized with strong systems thinking capabilities.
Background or coursework in design thinking (industrial design, visual/UX design, or design-thinking methods within an engineering background all count).
Comfort creating structure and concrete next steps out of ambiguous situations.
Interest in or exposure to product or process development.
Self-motivated with a strong bias toward action.

Responsibilities

Own continuous training and retraining for the team, especially on software tools and systems (e.g., setting up barcode scanners for inventory tracking, executing correct tasks in our internal Task Execution System (TES), and rolling out new features).
Serve as the first line of problem resolution when people get stuck on "how to do X" process and handle workflow edge cases (e.g., investigating and resolving missing parts in Odoo pick lists).
Build and maintain training materials that keep pace with evolving tools and workflows, such as on-demand video tutorials available in Slack or Drive.
Work with the team to surface, prioritize, and drive process improvement initiatives (e.g., optimizing station organization, backplane storage, and station ergonomics).
Design and run lightweight experiments, such as time studies for bottleneck tasks or station design comparisons, to validate whether proposed changes are actual improvements.
Help scope new initiatives and route feedback to the right people. You will be the daily "eyes and ears" on the ground, closing the loop on floor issues across sites so leadership can stay focused on design and procurement.
Ensure accessibility and dissemination of SOPs by implementing right-place, right-time process cues, signage, kanban cards, and helpful visual labeling at stations.
Ensure consistency of process and standards across multiple sites, guaranteeing that an improvement at Site A is successfully implemented at Site B.
Support General Managers with the tools and training their teams need to execute successfully, including sufficient documentation of spatial designs and station organization to allow new GMs to effectively "copy-paste" configurations.
Act as a champion for cross-site consistency—a "multisite regulatory force" for process standards—by conducting quarterly site reviews and audits.
Be the voice of management to help drive cultural change from the bottom up, building a culture around lean practices, providing feedback forums, and facilitating Kaizen events.
Take in feedback from the floor and iterate, while pushing process changes out where they'll have the most impact and finding creative ways to celebrate and elevate task completion.