Senior Operations Manager

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will be in the detail on project plans, SLAs, and escalations, and you will also be building the systems and standards that let us scale from 30 parallel projects to many more without adding chaos. You will work closely with the Head of Operations, Product and Engineering, and the Sales team.

Project Delivery & Execution

• Own end-to-end delivery for a portfolio of projects — scoping, timelines, installation, configuration, commissioning, UAT, and customer handover.
  
• Deliver projects on time and within budget, and hold the team to the same standard.
  
• Track and manage timelines and deliverables across technical verticals; anticipate slippage before it happens rather than reporting it afterwards.
  
• Own Response and Resolution SLAs across queues coming in from Product, Sales, and customers, and ensure optimal work distribution.
  
• Run root-cause analysis on delays and rework, and close the loop so the same failure does not repeat.
  

Technical Excellence

• Translate new requirements from Account Executives and customers into clear scope, technical requirements, and realistic timelines.
  
• Drive delivery of deep-tech projects (AI / ML / Computer Vision) with a hardware and software footprint on live production lines.
  
• Represent Operations in project discussions and client calls — identify the exact technical deliverable, communicate it clearly to the technical team, and drive it to completion.
  
• Continuously improve efficiency metrics: productivity, quality, first-time-right installation, and SLA adherence.
  
• Partner with Product and Engineering to feed structured field learnings back into the roadmap.
  

Customer Delight

• Own the relationship with client SPOCs through proactive communication and disciplined review cadence.
  
• Make sure what was agreed during the sales process is exactly what gets delivered — and that we consistently over-deliver.
  
• Align with the customer's own KPIs and drive improvement initiatives after the system goes live.
  
• Handle escalations and outages calmly and decisively — with the customer, and on the customer's behalf with third-party vendors.
  
• Communicate credibly with plant leadership and senior stakeholders at Fortune 500 manufacturers.
  

Planning & Resource Management

• Manage day-to-day planning, allocation, and problem-solving across a distributed field team.
  
• Own resource planning: who goes where, when, and for how long — balancing project urgency against team wellbeing.
  
• Track work hours and utilisation, and make the case for additional capacity with data when it is genuinely needed.
  
• Manage project costs, travel, and hardware logistics in coordination with Finance and Supply Chain.
  

Team Leadership

• Lead, coach, and develop a team of Field Application Engineers and Project Managers.
  
• Hire FAEs as our project count and geographic footprint expand — we look for technically stellar and deeply empathetic people.
  
• Build a high-performance environment that people want to stay in; our Operations team is one of the most driven teams at SwitchOn and keeping it that way is part of the job.
  
• Run regular one-on-ones and team meetings, surface issues early, and resolve conflict directly and fairly.
  
• Present team performance honestly to the Head of Operations and senior leadership — including what is not working.
  

Systems, Data & Reporting

• Maintain accurate records of execution time, delays, and root causes so that leadership can make data-driven decisions.
  
• Own operational hygiene in our tooling (JIRA / Asana / Zoho) as a source of truth, not an afterthought.
  
• Build and improve the SOPs, checklists, and playbooks that let a new FAE deliver to standard from their first site visit.
  

Must have

• 6–10 years in operations, project delivery, or field engineering management, ideally at a hardware plus software company or a deep-tech startup.
  
• 3+ years directly managing a team; comfortable leading 10–20 people across multiple sites.
  
• Track record of delivering complex hardware and software projects for large enterprise customers — ideally in industrial automation, machine vision, or production-line setup.
  
• Strong project management fundamentals: scoping, planning, risk management, stakeholder communication, and SLA governance.
  
• Working knowledge of manufacturing environments — shop-floor realities, plant protocols, shutdown windows, and safety requirements.
  
• Hands-on with project management and CRM tooling (JIRA, Asana, Zoho, Salesforce or equivalent).
  
• Excellent communication across every mode our customers use — email, phone, WhatsApp, and in-person plant visits.
  
• Willingness to travel to customer sites across India, and to be based in-office at our Bangalore HQ.
  

Strong plus

• Exposure to AI / ML / Computer Vision projects, or to Industry 4.0, IIoT, MES, or SCADA deployments.
  
• Experience scaling an operations or delivery function in a high-growth startup.
  
• B.Tech (Electronics / Instrumentation / Electrical / Mechanical) or equivalent technical grounding.
  
• Experience managing third-party vendors, system integrators, or contract installation partners.
  

• Be part of the leadership layer of a hyper-growth deep-tech company as we scale across India and abroad.
  

• Work on state-of-the-art AI projects for super-critical manufacturing applications — often the first AI deployment in that plant's history.
  

• Fortune 500 customers, real production lines, and problems that are genuinely hard and genuinely worth solving.
  

• A culture that values creativity, ownership, and high agency. Every day here is a story of doing something new.
  

• Meaningful ESOP participation at a post-Series-B stage.