Production Operations Manager
About The Position
TerraClear applies artificial intelligence, robotics, and world-class mechanical design to solve some of the most data deficient and labor intensive jobs on the farm. Our first application solved one of the most disliked tasks on the farm: clearing rocks. The annual emergence of news rocks impacts nearly half of farms in North America, slowing farming, damaging equipment, and causing downtime during seeding and harvesting. Solving this problem frees farmers to focus on higher-value tasks and brings their operations into a new era of farming. Leveraging our commercial success in rocks, we are now expanding our core technologies to new farm applications including the precise management of weeds, pests, disease and overall plant health. Our team is tight-knit and believes in the power of teamwork. We value learning directly from the farmers we serve, getting our hands dirty, and tackling tough challenges together. You will thrive at TerraClear with a positive attitude, a collaborative mindset, a healthy dose of grit and a passion for solving real-world problems. We’re looking for a Production Operations Manager to lead post-flight processing, quality control, and delivery of TerraClear’s map products. Our commitment is to provide farmers with high-quality maps by the day after image capture—and you’ll be accountable for the operational metrics that make that possible. In this role, you’ll work closely with our Flight Operations team as a critical link in the production chain, ensuring accurate, reliable map products move quickly from captured imagery to our farmer customers. This is a highly hands-on leadership role. You’ll manage a small team of specialists as well as seasonal processing technicians, providing day-to-day direction while building the capabilities needed to scale. You’ll develop and execute seasonal operating plans, strengthen the tools, processes, and systems that support production, and work alongside your team to consistently deliver at a high level.
Requirements
- 3+ years managing/operating a production, fulfillment, processing, or data-operations function with a daily throughput or turnaround commitment
- Experience owning, creating and planning shift schedules
- A track record of building processes, executing them, and owning responsibility of metrics of success
- Experience managing a small team, including recruiting and training seasonal or temporary staff
- Hands-on technical expertise: Windows environments, troubleshooting software and server error messages, and building tracking and reporting in Google Sheets
- Experience writing SOPs, and training materials,, developing metrics, and capacity planning
- Strong attention to detail, and the organizational discipline to hold a quality bar under time pressure
- Direct, clear communication that leads to action, with customer-facing teams as well as your own
- Comfort in a fast-paced startup where process is built rather than inherited
Nice To Haves
- Exposure to agriculture, geospatial or remote sensing work, drone imagery, or GIS
- Experience scaling an operation through a step change in volume, or standing up a new product line in an existing operation
- Familiarity and comfort discussing technology (AI, software, automation)
- Bachelor's degree in operations management, business, engineering, geospatial science, or a related field
Responsibilities
- Own on-time, high-quality map delivery
- Own delivery of maps next day after image capture, at quality standard
- Oversee a team that runs 24/7 in-season
- Develop, report, and improve turnaround and quality metrics
- Work with each shift to prioritize and strategically clear daily order queues
- Triage and rapidly resolve pipeline errors and order issues
- Deliver Sales and Customer Success reliable order statuses and delivery dates
- Improve the production pipeline
- Troubleshoot and drive recurring failures to a permanent fix with Product and Engineering teams
- Identify and implement process improvements and automation to raise throughput per shift and per person
- Coordinate with Flight Operations on image capture quality, timing, and handoff protocol
- Implement field and customer feedback into the production operations process
- Lead and staff the Production Operations team
- Manage the production operations specialists, including weekly 1:1s, goal setting, and performance feedback
- Recruit, onboard, and train seasonal processing techs (approximately 3 in fall, 9 in spring, every year)
- Plan seasonal shift coverage alongside production operations specialists
- Write and maintain process documentation, SOPs, and training materials
- Plan capacity for the season
- Build seasonal capacity plan and communicate required budget, staffing, and infrastructure
- Represent production operations in quarterly and annual planning cycles
- Bring new map products into commercial production
- Define process, quality control protocol, and training regimen for new map products
- Partner with Flight Operations, Product, and Engineering to implement processes that will scale commercially with growth of new products
Benefits
- Pre-IPO stock options (tax-advantaged ISOs)
- Competitive base salary
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance - 100% of premiums paid for employees and 85% of premiums paid for dependents
- Generous paid time off and holidays
- 401(k) Plan
- An inclusive and tight company culture that is mission driven
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Manager
