Head of Manufacturing Engineering

TAR; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Up to $15K relocation bonus

Unlimited PTO

Health, Dental, Vision insurance

$1K monthly meals

Job summary

TAR is seeking a Head of Manufacturing Engineering to scale production across multiple robot programs at our San Francisco facility. You will own strategy, standards, and capital planning to move from prototype builds to reliable, high-volume manufacturing.

You will lead a growing team of engineers, set quality systems, and align capacity with our rapid growth goals, while representing manufacturing to customers and investors.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of manufacturing engineering experience, including 5+ years in a leadership role.
• Experience scaling manufacturing engineering across multiple product lines, programs, or sites, beyond a single line.
• Track record owning capital equipment planning and budget for scale-up at a strategic level.
• Experience building and leading a team of manufacturing engineers and leads.
• Deep expertise across the manufacturing value chain: DFM, tooling, process development, and quality systems.
• Strong communication skills to present decisions to executive leadership, customers, and investors.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the manufacturing engineering strategy and roadmap across TAR's robotics product lines, aligning capacity, tooling, and process investment.
• Build and lead the manufacturing engineering organization, hiring, structuring, and developing engineers and leads.
• Own capital equipment and capacity planning to scale from prototype to high-volume manufacturing.
• Set manufacturing engineering standards, quality systems, and documentation practices company-wide.
• Own supplier and contract manufacturer strategy, selecting and negotiating with partners.
• Establish root-cause and continuous-improvement processes feeding future lines.
• Serve as the senior manufacturing engineering voice on the leadership team and influence investments.
• Represent manufacturing engineering externally with customers, partners, and investors.

Skills

Manufacturing engineering leadership

Scale-up experience

DFM

Tooling

Quality systems

Executive communication

Capex planning

Contract manufacturer strategy

Root-cause & continuous improvement

Job description

Mission

TAR’s mission is to power intelligence for the world. We are building the world’s first off-grid power plant for data centers powered by renewable technologies.

We firmly believe AI should be built in the US for the benefit of all people. For that, power must be fast, clean and scalable. We are singularly focused on delivering GW-scale power faster than anyone has ever done, by rethinking every layer of the stack.

We vertically integrate to solve every bottleneck, from racking systems to power electronics to dispatch algorithms to on-site construction.

Leave your mark on the future of civilization-scale energy infrastructure.

Company

TAR is both a hardware and software company, we are building out massive, critical, physical infrastructure. TAR is working directly with one of the largest compute providers to scale and deploy 5GWs by 2028.

We operate on…

• High ownership. High Agency. Own project end-to-end. Great people don’t need to be managed.

• Speed. We achieve great things on incredible timelines. We push ourselves to go faster.

• First principles. No ego. No hierarchy. Challenge every assumption.

• Passion. Solving the energy problem is one of the largest challenges that faces the world now and in the future.

About the role

TAR builds its own construction robots to install its proprietary racking at gigawatt scale, and building those machines at rate is its own engineering discipline. As the fleet grows from prototypes to production across multiple robot programs, manufacturing engineering becomes the constraint on how fast TAR can put working machines in the field. As Head of Manufacturing Engineering, you own that discipline company-wide. You take TAR from single-line, hands-on builds to a manufacturing engineering organization with the standards, quality systems, and capital and capacity planning to scale from low-rate production to reliable, higher-volume manufacturing across every program. This is a senior leadership seat, based at our San Francisco robotics facility.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the manufacturing engineering strategy and roadmap across TAR's robotics product lines, aligning capacity, tooling, and process investment with the company's scaling plans.

• Build and lead the manufacturing engineering organization, hiring, structuring, and developing engineers and engineering leads as the function grows beyond a single line.

• Own capital equipment and capacity planning, forecasting the headcount, tooling, and facility investment needed to scale from prototype and low-rate production to reliable, higher-volume manufacturing across multiple programs.

• Set the manufacturing engineering standards, quality systems, and documentation practices that apply company-wide, so every product line meets the same bar for austere-environment reliability instead of reinventing process line by line.

• Own supplier and contract manufacturer strategy at the organizational level, setting the criteria by which manufacturing partners are selected, negotiated with, and held accountable.

• Establish company-wide root-cause and continuous-improvement processes so lessons from any single line or product feed back into how every future line is built.

• Serve as the senior manufacturing engineering voice on the leadership team, shaping investment decisions, make-versus-buy trade-offs, and production timelines with engineering, supply chain, and executive leadership.

• Represent manufacturing engineering externally with customers, partners, and investors when technical and operational credibility earns trust.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of manufacturing engineering experience, including 5+ years in a leadership role (Director, Head of, or VP level) building and running a manufacturing engineering organization, not a single line.

• Demonstrated experience scaling manufacturing engineering across multiple product lines, programs, or sites, beyond standing up one assembly line.

• Track record owning capital equipment planning and budget for manufacturing scale-up, including make-versus-buy and contract manufacturer decisions at a strategic level.

• Experience building and leading a team of manufacturing engineers and engineering leads, including hiring and developing people managers.

• Deep expertise across the manufacturing value chain: DFM, tooling, process development, and quality systems, with the ability to set standards other engineers execute against.

• Strong communication skills, comfortable representing manufacturing engineering decisions to executive leadership, customers, and investors.

Nice to have

• Experience manufacturing hardware for austere, field, or defense-adjacent environments.

• Experience scaling manufacturing engineering at a high-growth, venture-backed hardware or robotics company, such as Anduril, SpaceX, or Tesla.

• Familiarity with formal quality systems (ISO, AS9100) applied at an organizational rather than single-line level.

• Experience standing up a manufacturing engineering function from its first hire, including building out the managers and leads beneath you.

Salary and Benefits

• Up to $15K relocation bonus

• Unlimited PTO

• Health, Dental, Vision insurance

• $1K monthly stipend for meals