Technical Director

Crestwood Partners; Michigan; On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Crestwood Partners has been retained to appoint a Technical Director for a long-established, specialist US manufacturer of precision-engineered advanced material products. You will own the technical strategy, roadmaps, and the entire product lifecycle from concept through production, spanning materials development, scale-up, and customer-facing discourse.

You will lead a team across powder processing, forming, thermal processing, grinding, finishing, and testing.

Responsibilities

• Technical strategy and long-term product and capability roadmap ownership
• New product development from concept through qualification into production
• Materials and formulation development across processes
• Manufacturing process development, scale-up and consistency
• Root-cause leadership on production problems
• Building and developing the technical and engineering team
• Senior technical relationships with customers who value deep technical knowledge

Job description

Somewhere in a large materials business right now, there is a technical leader who knows more about their product than anyone in the building, and who still needs three signatures and a steering committee to change anything.

They own one slice of the lifecycle. Development happens in one building, manufacturing in another, the customer conversation in a third, and the interesting decisions happen two levels up. Their ideas are good. Their influence is diluted. And every year the org chart grows another layer between them and the work.

This appointment is the opposite of that.

Crestwood Partners has been retained to appoint a Technical Director for a long-established, specialist US manufacturer of precision-engineered advanced material products. Our client is profitable, respected in demanding industrial markets, and deliberately sized so that its senior technical leader owns the whole thread: the material, the formulation, the process, the scale-up, the qualification, the production problem at 7am and the customer conversation at 2pm. When something ships better because of a decision you made, you will know, and so will everyone else.

What you will own:

• Technical strategy and the long-term product and capability roadmap
• New product development, from concept through qualification into reliable production
• Materials and formulation development
• Manufacturing process development, scale-up and consistency
• Root-cause leadership on the production problems nobody else can crack
• Building and developing the technical and engineering team
• Senior technical relationships with customers who want to talk to the person who actually knows

The environment spans powder processing, forming and pressing, thermal processing, precision grinding and finishing, and materials testing. You do not need to be the world's leading expert in every process. You need enough breadth to lead teams, challenge assumptions and make decisions that hold up on the plant floor.

Who we are looking for:

• A senior technical leader, likely a Technical Director, R&D Director, Engineering Director, Head of Technology, or a strong manager ready for their first directorship position
• A background in technical ceramics, abrasives, powder metallurgy, cemented carbides, cutting tools, refractories or a similar hard-materials manufacturing environment
• Proven experience taking new products from concept into full production, and the scars to show for it
• A leader of people, not just projects: someone who has built capability in a technical team, not merely managed a plan
• Visible in the plant by instinct, comfortable moving between strategy in the morning and a furnace problem in the afternoon
• Low ego, high standards, commercially aware, and measured by what reaches the customer

And then there is the life. This role is based in the kind of Michigan community where the outdoors starts at the end of your street, the commute is measured in minutes, and your neighbors know your name by the second week. Real seasons, real space, and a cost of living that turns a good salary into a genuinely good life, the kind either coast quietly stopped offering years ago. For the right family, the move is not the sacrifice. It is the point.

This will not suit everyone. If you want a large corporate support structure and narrowly divided responsibilities, stay where you are. But if you have spent years converting materials knowledge into products inside someone else's system, this is the rare chance to run the system: to be the technical authority in a business small enough to move and established enough to matter.