Operations Manager

SafeAI sees the future of heavy industry with off-road autonomous vehicles reshaping industries like construction and mining. We are pioneering a new approach to autonomous off-road equipment with AI-powered, vehicle and manufacturer agnostic technology that enables heavy industry operations to retrofit any piece of equipment with autonomous technology. Since 2017, we’ve been steadily establishing a foundation for the future, targeting the most important, heavily used off-road vehicles and industry segments to drive meaningful impacts across safety, productivity and cost reduction. We are now entering an era of massive industry adoption and are excited to be a commanding force in accelerating this movement to transform heavy industry with connected autonomy.

As a fast paced, high growth company serving a very important mission, our amazing and talented team is a huge part of bringing this mission to reality. The work that you do at SafeAI will give you a unique perspective on developing and deploying leading edge autonomous technology and solutions, while working with top tier participants in the industry, and across the globe. The leadership team at SafeAI brings a unique blend of autonomous technology and industry specific experience from some of the top companies in the world, such as Google, Apple, Tesla, Continental, Uber, Caterpillar, BHP and Rio Tinto. We are strategically headquartered in Silicon Valley, with team members and office locations established in Perth, Australia, Tokyo, Japan and New Delhi, India that you would collaborate with on a regular basis.

SafeAI is seeking a highly capable operations manager to deploy autonomous solutions at customer sites. This role will liaise between the engineering team, hardware, and software development teams, SafeAI and customer site operations teams in both US and Australia.  In this role you will manage the deployment of autonomous solutions on construction and mining machines with end-to-end responsibility for customer engagement at site with formal project management approach, safety, deep understanding of customer application to develop solution, customer and partner personnel training, site productivity and overall success of autonomous solution deployment. This is senior leadership role with hands on approach to provide leadership for site installations and validation of hardware kits, site application specific development and validation of autonomy software testing and validation on autonomous vehicles, collection of vehicle data logs, validation of site setup with people and process, execution of tests and performing on-site map maintenance tasks with focus on continuous improvement of site operations and autonomous solution deployment.

·      Work closely with customers and SafeAI field sales team to develop detailed project plan for deployment of autonomous solutions at site level with agreed KPI and timeline and close collaboration with US, Australia, and India based teams

·      Develop and document specific customer requirement and deliverables at site in close collaborations with SafeAI sales and engineering team, mine operations and maintenance teams and key stakeholders

·      Set up formal cadence and governance for by shift, daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly tasks and goals tracking

·      Develop site Safety plan in close collaborations with customer operations team for deployment of autonomous solutions

·      Develop site change management plan with customer operations team

·      Develop customer site personnel training plan for deployment and continuously improve the plan based on daily and weekly progress of deployment

·      Work with customer site level team to benchmark manned operations and productivity and agree on timeline for measurement of productivity with autonomous vehicles

·      Develop safety, productivity and deployment project plan with customer and set up Project Management cadence and governance with daily and weekly update to senior management, cross functional team, and key customer personnel

·      Recruit, develop and train core team from SafeAI, partners and customers to deploy autonomous solutions with agreed safety, productivity KPIs

·      Partner with local universities and institutions to develop and implement talent pipeline for long term support of deployment with local and trained talent.

·      Develop and document process for deployment at site using LEAN principles to align all stakeholders and develop continuous improvement mind set for faster iteration of autonomous solutions focused on site specific requirements.

·      Coordinate activities (installation, testing, maintenance, etc.) at customer sites in support of the roll out of our products

·      Ensure site level deployment plans are well communicated to all teams and leadership team to develop and implement culture of “Customer focus” in development and deployment process.

·      Ensure our products and on-site teams meet all required processes for operation at customer sites

·      Support customer site operational evaluation testing

·      Perform data collection tasks to support map generation.  This will include validation of the data and execution of first stage processing

·      Perform map editing tasks to alter autonomous vehicle maps based on environmental details.

·      Work with our engineering teams to understand the site requirements for our autonomous vehicles and supporting systems then with the customer to deliver those requirements

·      Bachelor’s degree in engineering, mining, construction, or a related field

·      3+ years in a supervisory role in manufacturing, automobile, airline, retail, mining, marine, oil and gas, or construction related operations team leadership

·      3+ years working with safety procedures and processes, especially in a mining or construction environment

·      Ability to take ownership, investigate and drive issue resolution

·      Ability to work with minimal supervision in a highly safety conscious environment with limited communications to the office.

·      Strong project management and execution skills

·      Strong customer relationship management and cross functional team collaboration skills

·      Strong presentation and communication skills

·      Ability to travel for extended period to be on sites going through autonomous system deployment

·      Experience in running operations, product development or project teams to deliver results with PDCA (plan do check act) LEAN mindset in industrial, automobile, airline, marine, oil and gas or mining or construction industries.

·      Experience with Autonomous vehicle safety critical map management and production.

·      Experience with Testing or implementing robotic solutions / applications using ROS

·      Experience with hardware and software system used in manufacturing, mining or construction industries.

In addition to a very competitive compensation and benefits package, we offer a fantastic culture and fun place to work within an established start-up environment. As an Equal Opportunity Employer M/F/D/V/SO, we do not discriminate in employment and personnel practices on the basis of race, sex, age, handicap, religion, national origin or any other basis prohibited by applicable law.

We hope that you’re a great candidate for this position and look forward to speaking with you.