Director of R&D operations

What We’re Looking For?

Mighty Buildings seeks to balance its leadership team with a diverse background spanning advanced materials, additive manufacturing, and scalable manufacturing processes.

The person who fills this role will lead a cross-functional team of scientists and engineers to collaboratively build a portfolio of products and production technologies to disrupt the global building and construction market.

The person will be responsible for inspiring the team to execute with passion and velocity while balancing the quality and sustainability of the product, as well as the company. You will recruit and maintain the people, define the development process, and represent the function to the rest of the leadership team at Mighty Buildings.

We are looking for proven research and engineering team leaders who are also technical and have demonstrated knowledge and success by leveraging new advanced materials and technologies in broken industries by increasing overall productivity in a sustainable way.

What You’ll Be Doing?

• Technical management, coordination, and control of cross-functional teams working on new materials & production methods.
• Responsible for managing the budget of the R&D organization.
• Should be the lead recruiter when it comes to looking at R&D and Engineering talents.
• Short and long-term R&D Roadmap development and execution.
• The primary interface to the R&D organization for internal collaboration as well as with external partners.
• Build deep and collaborative partnerships with cross-functional leaders across our R&D, Product, and Operations teams to deliver on the product roadmap.
• Providing scientific and engineering expertise to help executives make informed decisions about company goals.
• Drive our culture by leading, mentoring, and coaching our technical/integration team leaders and engineers.
• Reporting directly to Chief Innovation Officer

What needs immediate attention? 

• The immediate goal is to maximize the collaboration and efficiency of the existing R&D team as they execute against our product plans, goals and OKRs.
• Within the first 90 days, we would love to see a strong collaborative dynamic with the rest of the key functions like operations, product and finance and key executives.
• The person needs to demonstrate integration leadership across the R&D and Product organization with necessary skills in planning, budgeting, translating product requirements into engineering solutions and managing the fluid execution of the backlog with a highly efficient and high-quality sustainable team velocity.

What’s Required?

• We need a great people manager with a solid research and engineering background who is willing to take responsibility for making every member of the R&D and engineering teams successful.
• A PhD in Material Science or a related field with at least 10-15 years of experience in research and development, with a focus on developing new materials.
• The person who understands the different character types prefers carrot vs. stick. They know how to get people to hit deadlines.
• Fluent English: Mighty Buildings’ team is International.
• Experience retaining and growing teams of researchers and engineers.
• Experience collaborating with external partners on joint research and development initiatives that resulted in commercially-proven products. 
• Experience delivering complex products from concept to the scaled manufacturing stage with a strong background in NPI (new product engineering) and product delivery.
• Experience collaborating with product management to create robust and reliable product roadmaps.

What’s Nice to Have?

• Knows how to manage the agile development process.
• The person who is familiar with V-Model or TRL frameworks.
• Personal ability to architect complex systems.