Head of Lean Six Sigma

Squint Inc; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Squint Inc. is seeking a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt to drive factory improvements and embed continuous improvement into our AI product. You will report to the CEO and direct efforts across sales, deployment, and engineering to identify bottlenecks and deliver measurable value.

You will train teams to annotate time studies, run on-site workshops, and ensure the improvements are sustained through SOPs and training. This is a hands-on, high-impact role in a fast-growing SF company.

Qualifications

• Experience applying Lean Six Sigma in manufacturing environments.
• Ability to translate industrial insight into actionable playbooks.
• Proven capability to lead workshops and coach teams.

Responsibilities

• Define how the world will manufacture with AI and build Lean Six Sigma playbooks.
• Collaborate with sales to identify bottlenecks and frame value in customer language.
• Lead pilots and ensure measurable improvements on the factory floor.

Skills

Lean Six Sigma

Black Belt

Factory experience

Cross-functional collaboration

Job description

About Us

Our mission is to accelerate human potential.

Squint is the Industrial AI company that turns operating knowledge into action. Our technology serves Fortune 500 leaders across manufacturing, field services, and utilities. Companies such as PepsiCo, Continental Tire, and Tenneco use Squint to capture and activate their essential tribal knowledge, standards docs, and OT data into procedures, orchestrated work, and context for AI agents to act on.

Some things to know about us:

• We are obsessed with our customers, and they'll tell you so themselves.
• We've raised over $60M from elite investors including Sequoia Capital, Menlo Ventures, TCV and The Westly Group.
• Company awards include:
  • Fast Company Most Innovative Companies in 2025 and 2026
  • Fast Company Best Workplaces for Innovators 2026
  • Built In's Best Startups to Work for in SF
  • Manufacturing Today Supplier Innovation Awards 2025
• Read more about us in Upstarts Media, Fortune, Forbes, and more.

About the Role

Squint is building the AI agent that makes continuous improvement truly continuous. Record 18 minutes of a changeover on a phone and, without a word of narration, our Lean Manufacturing Agent hands back a complete time and motion study: every segment of work identified, classified against all seven forms of waste, and broken out into a work instruction. That used to take a consultant, a stopwatch, and several weeks. Nothing has been able to do this before. It's the result of breakthroughs we've made in vision language models, and a world-class engineering team that is still pushing the frontier.

The technology is now ahead of the industry's ability to use it. Some of our customers are sophisticated operations with process engineers and mature Lean Six Sigma practices, and they want the sharpest tool on the market. Many more are seeing this capability for the first time, and a power tool is only as good as the hands holding it: without an experienced practitioner’s judgment, they'll point the camera at the wrong process and run payback math on the wrong number. Our vision is to build that judgment into the product, so that picking up Squint is as simple as a consumer app: it surveys your factory and asks the right questions, identifies the bottleneck, measures and analyzes the process as it runs today, drafts the improvement plan, and hands you a fully configured Squint to hold the gains through training, troubleshooting, and SOPs. Shaping that future of industrial AI takes someone who knows how a factory actually gets fixed and can teach it to our customers and our own teams alike. Right now, nobody at Squint owns that across how product decides what to build, how sales qualifies a plant, how marketing describes us, and how we deliver once the contract is signed.

We're hiring a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt to be that person. You'll report directly to the CEO, and your week goes wherever the highest-leverage problem is: teaching the sales team to find a bottleneck in a 30-minute discovery call, sitting with engineers to annotate gold-standard time studies, or flying to a customer site to run the workshop yourself. You've fixed factories, not just visited them, and you want to turn that expertise into something a product can eventually do on its own.

What You’ll Do

This is a cross-functional role by design. You report to the CEO because you will work with every team in the company, helping each one translate what it is world-class at into something that makes a measurable difference on a factory floor.

• Define how the world will manufacture with AI. Build the playbook that applies Lean Six Sigma rigor to any customer, in any industry, facing any situation: a discovery process that diagnoses the current state, helps Squint identify the plant's bottleneck, and delivers measurable value at first use, before pricing ever comes up. The processes and playbooks you author become the standard our sales, deployment, and product teams operate by.
• With sales: build the go-to-market playbook for AI on the factory floor. Join pre-sales conversations alongside our sales team and build the process that lets us reliably understand a factory's bottleneck, choose the right use case, and speak the customer's language from the first call. Teach the team to recognize whether they're talking to a mature continuous improvement organization or a plant seeing this for the first time, and how to bring a first-of-its-kind product onto the floor with the operators who will run it.
• With deployment: make pilots pay off. What we build has to do more than sell; it has to make factories measurably more efficient. Work inside live customer pilots, learn what works and what doesn't, and build the playbook our deployment team uses to reliably turn any pilot into delivered improvement.
• With engineering and product: be the operator in the