Head of Production

The Open Robot Company; Ahmedabad District; On-site; INR 1,500,000 - 2,500,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Performance bonus

Job summary

The Open Robot Company in Ahmedabad seeks a production lead to run a high-midelity electronics assembly line. You will own QC, calibration, testing, casing, and shipping with strict traceability and serial-by-serial documentation.

You’ll ensure every unit meets pass criteria and ships on time. You will plan weekly setup, calibration, testing, packing, and coordinate with vendors and the founders on pass criteria, volume targets, and budgets.

Qualifications

• Three+ years of electronics hardware assembly/production experience in India.
• Experience in high-mix, low-volume production with multiple variants.
• Experience setting up a production line or station from scratch.
• Experience managing logistics, dispatch and exports.
• Experience running calibrated tests with numeric pass thresholds.
• Experience with incoming inspection and vendor management, rejecting batches.
• Ability to read logs and differentiate software vs hardware failures.
• Strong record-keeping of serials, batches, yields, stock and shipments.
• Ability to hire, train and supervise a small team of assemblers.
• Based in Ahmedabad or willing to move; fluency in Gujarati or Hindi on the floor; English with founders/vendors.

Responsibilities

• Own QC gate criteria; ensure every device passes before boxing.
• Calibrate cameras per unit and verify against numeric thresholds.
• Plan and hit weekly production schedules; flag slips early.
• Oversee end-to-end logistics: parts, dispatch, exports, and paperwork.
• Maintain traceability sheets for parts and calibrations; manage logs.
• Hire, train and manage a small assembler team.

Skills

Production experience

High-mix low-volume

Line setup

Logistics management

Calibration tests

Vendor management

Diagnostics

Record keeping

Team leadership

Relocation willingness

Job description

You set up and run production of OpenRobot devices in Ahmedabad, from parts arriving to finished products delivered. Three things matter most, in this order: nothing ships that has not passed QC, every order ships on the date committed, and you always know where every shipment is. Today this happens in bursts, by whoever is around. Your job is to make it run the same way every day without a founder in the room.

You own

• QC, above everything: every device is set up, verified and test-recorded before it is boxed. You set the pass criteria with the founders and nothing leaves without passing them. A known bad part never ships.
• Calibration: every camera is calibrated per unit before it ships and the result is checked against a numeric pass threshold, not eyeballed. The calibration file travels with the unit's serial. Any lens or mount work means recalibration. On a multi-camera product this is the longest and most unforgiving step on the floor, and it is yours.
• Production schedule: orders come in, you commit a date, and you hit it. You plan the week's setup, calibration, testing and packing against the orders and flag a slip days before it happens, not after.
• Logistics, end to end: you figure out how parts get to us and how products get to customers, and you run it. Courier and freight partners, rates and pickup schedules; inbound parts from vendors in India and abroad; domestic dispatch with the paperwork right; export shipments with the customs paperwork done right the first time; returns coming back. Every box tracked, and the customer hears from us before they have to ask.
• Device setup: every unit's software is loaded and verified on a dedicated station with a reject log. Storage media has been our biggest field failure, so this step is never skipped or rushed.
• Build quality: devices cased, labelled, serialised and packed with the right power, storage and documentation, finished to a standard a customer would photograph, the same way every time.
• Parts and stock: every vendor; incoming inspection; stock levels and reorder points so a shipment is never late for want of a part.
• Traceability: which parts and which calibration went into which unit, serial by serial, so a field failure traces back to a batch and a vendor.
• Repairs and returns: units coming back from the field get diagnosed, fixed or scrapped, and the reason feeds back into QC.
• The team: you hire, train and schedule the assemblers and hold them to the standard.

What the line has to be

Not a fixed line for one product. A unit that builds finished products to one standard, whatever is ordered that month.

Our products share the same way of being built: set up, calibrated, tested, cased, documented and shipped with a serial. The parts, the volumes and the tests change per product. The standard does not: fit and finish a customer would photograph, every unit identical to the last, every unit tested as a whole before it ships, and documentation and packaging that match.

So you build the foundation once and make it the same for every product: one parts system, one setup step, one QC gate, one traceability sheet, one way to package and dispatch. A new product is a new set of work instructions, jigs and test criteria dropped onto that foundation, not a new factory. Orders arrive on demand, in batches of tens to a few hundred, with mixed products in a month, and the unit flexes with them without the quality moving.

Where the role starts and stops

Product design sits with the product team. They take a design to production-ready: the enclosure, the parts list, the first working units. At handover, the design is frozen for that batch.

From that handover, the line is yours. You do not redesign the product. You build it the same way every time, you measure how it fails, and you send that evidence back to product with a clear ask. When a change is approved it comes to you as a new revision with a date, and you cut over the line cleanly.

With the founders you set the pass criteria, the monthly volume and the budget. Everything inside those three numbers is your call.

Who we are looking for

Must have

• Three or more years running assembly or production of electronic hardware in India, at a scale of hundreds of units a month. Consumer electronics, IoT devices, cameras, drones, medical devices or similar.
• You have run high-mix, low-volume production: several product variants on one floor, batch sizes that change month to month, and changeovers that do not break quality.
• You have set up a line or a station from nothing at least once: layout, jigs, work instructions, training.
• You have run logistics yourself: courier and freight partners, domestic dispatch and its paperwork, some export shipments, and inbound parts from vendors. You know what goes wrong at a courier desk and at customs.
• You have run a measured test or calibration step in production, optical, electrical or mechanical, with a numeric pass threshold you held people to.
• You have run incoming inspection and vendor management for electronic parts, and you have rejected a batch and made it stick.
• Comfortable with computer-based devices: you can follow a setup procedure, read a log, and tell a software failure from a hardware one well enough to route it.
• You keep records without being asked: serials, batches, yields, stock, shipments, calibrations. Spreadsheet discipline is enough; we will give you better tools.
• You can hire, train and hold a small team of assemblers to a standard.
• Based in Ahmedabad or willing to move. Gujarati or Hindi for the floor, English for the founders and vendors.

Nice to have

• Experience with cameras, sensors or any product that needs per-unit calibration or testing.
• Experience shipping product abroad.
• Experience handling repairs and returns.

How we work

We are a small team and the founders are often with customers in other cities. You will have a lot of room and very little hand-holding. Problems from the field arrive at odd hours and the fix usually traces back to the line, so you will hear about every failure, with the logs. We would rather you tell us a batch is bad before it ships than explain afterwards. You will wear several hats and get your hands dirty: building units yourself when the line is short, packing boxes when a shipment is due, fixing a returned device, chasing a vendor. Nobody here is above any of that, including the founders.

This is not for you if

you need a finished process to follow, you want to design the product rather than build it, or you are not comfortable being the single person responsible for whether a device works when it reaches an operator.

About OpenRobot

OpenRobot builds data capture devices that work at fleet scale. Our wearable cameras record how people do physical work, so robots can learn from it. Hundreds of our devices are in use across India today, recording every day for robotics labs.

The product is changing fast and getting simpler to assemble. What decides whether a device works in the field is the work around it: setting up and verifying every device, calibrating every camera, testing every unit, casing and packing it properly, and getting it to the customer on the date we promised. A faulty part or a late shipment costs a customer a day of data and costs us a support night. We have learned that the hard way, and we want the person who makes those problems go away at the source.

Details

Location

Ahmedabad, on site, full time

Reports to

The founders

Team

You hire your first two to four assemblers in the first two months

Pay

₹15 to 25 lakh a year depending on experience, plus equity and a performance bonus (we are flexible on this end for the right candidate)