Who this is for. You have taken a physical-product operation through a real scale-up before, as the #2 or as the #1 somewhere smaller. You were the person who wrote the procedures after the first ugly launch. You have double-sourced a consumable after a vendor slip cost you a quarter. You have watched a build rate triple. Where you are now, you feel constrained to apply your full potential and you are ready to own manufacturing end to end, from the first SOP to the staffed floor. You’re ready to be the person who built the operation that took a company from a small floor to a massive one.

Why now. In June, 13 people shipped ~2000 items in 5 weeks without automation. Your job is to replace heroics with systems. We have been sold out three to four months forward for the last 18 months, so the system has to be built while the line keeps running.

The seat. You report to the CEO. You own SF manufacturing and fulfillment end to end: the production floor, the technicians on it, inventory, packaging, shipping, and the vendors that feed all of it. You own the interface with our Indonesia manufacturing site (devices, parts flow, handoffs, quality at the boundary), but you do not run that site, it has its own lead. Software engineering builds the tooling you spec. You work directly with the three founders: a Harvard PhD who reversed aging in the lab, an applied-AI PhD and math olympian, and a hardware engineer who built much of 10x Genomics' automation layer.

Your mission. Set up and run manufacturing and distribution in South San Francisco as a machine: high quality tech shipped at a multiple of today's volume, with clear metrics throughout and no founder in the loop.

What you will do. Write the v1 process yourself, stand at the station and run it, find where it breaks, fix the process rather than the instance, then hand it to a technician and move to the next one. Double-source or in-source every critical consumable. Put build, ship, defect, and COGS numbers on one screen the whole company can see. Hire and train the SF ops team once the processes are stable enough to hand over.

What you will achieve.

• 90 days: every critical-path consumable double-sourced or in-house. Written SOPs at every station, tested by you at the station.
• 6 months: live build/ship/defect/COGS dashboard with inventory visibility. A launch crunch run without the founder in the war room.
• 9 months: a staffed SF ops team, a multiple of today's throughput with defect rate flat or down, and COGS per unit trending down.

Why Olden.

90% of therapies fail in human trials, and their fate is decided in animal studies still run by hand with 1960s methods. Olden turns an ordinary cage into an automated platform that captures 20 health biomarkers continuously. Every unit you ship is a lab that can run a study it could not run before. Full mission at the bottom of this page.

Required

• Operations or manufacturing for physical products, through at least one significant scale-up.
• You have built SOPs and processes from scratch.
• Real supply-chain and multi-vendor sourcing experience, including at least one vendor failure you engineered around.
• Hands-on now, team-builder later.

Bonus

• Lab, medical-device, or contract-manufacturing background.
• Experience working with an overseas manufacturing site.
• Technical enough to build your own dashboards and automation.