Director of Engineering

One seat owns engineering at a specialty chemical manufacturer in Fairfield County, Connecticut, from day one: the engineering team and every stage gate after R&D, with production, EHS, and procurement moving under it once engineering leadership is in place.It's a company of roughly three dozen people, and the role reports to the President and sits on the management team. New product development runs through this function, and so do the cost models the company quotes from. Until now the President has led engineering himself. You'd take it over with a direct line to the top of the company.

About the Company

The business is custom chemical manufacturing. Customers bring chemistry they can't make themselves, either because their volumes are too small or because the IP matters too much to send overseas, and the team takes it from lab development through pilot to commercial production. The portfolio reaches customers in electronics, adhesives, coatings, and consumer products.

Roughly 75 customers sit on the books against an eight-figure revenue base, and leadership is diversifying that base. The plant runs about 30 reactors in stainless steel, glass, and Hastelloy, and holds ISO 9001 certification. Most of the building is science-minded, and process discipline runs deep because the chemistry leaves little margin for error.

About the Role

The Director of Operations leads the Engineering Supervisor directly, with three degreed engineers and a fourth being recruited. Production, EHS, and procurement move under this seat incrementally once engineering leadership is in place. Engineers own tranches of the portfolio: reviewing and closing chemical operating procedures on released batches, writing them for new products, improving processes already running, and diagnosing the batch that came back off spec. R&D answers whether the chemistry works at all. This role answers whether the plant can run it in its own equipment, at the purity the customer specified.

In the near term you’d carry a product or two yourself while the fourth engineer is hired. The longest-tenured engineer has made nearly everything the plant has ever produced and still leads the pilot-scale work. Capital recommendations sit with this seat, from which reactor gets replaced to what each project will cost. Onboarding is with the President for the first month, and the engineering and operations meetings are yours within three months.

The Goal

Six months in, engineering runs without the President in it. The team has a manager it counts on, mentoring and the weekly cadence hold on their own, and the cost models going out to customers carry your review. From there, production, EHS, and procurement move under this seat incrementally, and the full operations function runs through you.

Outcomes You'll Be Responsible For

Stabilize and develop the engineering team: Lead an engineering team whose tenure runs from more than 40 years to several months. Run the weekly one-on-ones and the weekly engineering meeting, and have mentoring going on its own inside three months. This is a quiet, deliberate group, so the one-on-ones do a lot of the work.

Own engineering delivery through the stage gate: Everything after R&D lands here. Engineers hold their product tranches, and the plant-side answer is yours. Operations and R&D work well together here, and the way that holds is with data on the table and a shared answer between what's technically right and what runs reliably in the plant.

Answer the feasibility question on new business: New business development is the company's top priority for the next couple of years, and engineering is central to it. Customers come here because they need chemistry taken from lab scale into a plant. On the early calls, that's an engineering answer. Sit in with the business development manager, say what the equipment supports and what it would take, and give that read while the project is still on paper.

Stand behind the numbers on a quote: The engineer on a project builds the cost model. Yours is the last review before it reaches the customer, down to raw material, man-hours, reactor hours, cleaning, and waste. Which equipment needs capital, and what each project will cost, sits here too.

Build plant credibility and expand into full operations: Earn the trust of the plant, production, and maintenance teams, and support restaffing across plant and engineering. Once engineering leadership is in place, production, EHS, and procurement move under this seat.

Skills Needed to Apply

BS or MS in chemical engineering, and used in a chemical manufacturing career since. Chemical process engineering, chemical and biomolecular engineering, and accredited international equivalents count.

Process engineering experience in specialty, batch, or fine chemical manufacturing where the process is a reaction rather than a blend. You know what happens when a reaction runs hot or solidifies in a reactor, and why a process runs in glass instead of stainless.

3+ years leading engineers, as a manager or as a project or technical lead accountable for their development and performance, after time as an individual contributor.

A one-on-one and team cadence people count on, and the hard conversations handled directly. You can point to a green engineer you brought along or an underperformer you coached.

Cross-functional diplomacy: you’ve worked across engineering, R&D, and quality, and can walk through a specific disagreement you settled with data.

Nice to have:

Scale-up owned from lab or pilot into commercial production, with the failure modes named: heat transfer, mixing, filtration, drying. Tech transfer counts.

Engineering and production run together at a chemical plant, with EHS and/or procurement reporting to you. Having had a plant manager or production supervisors report to you also qualifies.

Manufacturing cost models built from raw inputs, or a departmental budget with capital expenditure you’ve owned.

Direct experience with coatings, adhesives, energy-curable chemistries, or electronic materials. High-purity specialty synthesis is the closest match.

A plant of 30 to a couple hundred people with no central engineering group, or a stretch at a larger site where you did the analysis and the vendor coordination yourself.

ISO audits from the inside, plus OSHA PSM and process hazard analysis.

Qualities

Technically credible: Respect gets earned through substance. The engineers and the maintenance crew decide quickly whether you know the chemistry and the equipment, and the institutional memory here sits with people who value getting their hands dirty.

Diplomatic under friction: Disagreement gets engaged in the moment and face to face. Chemistry-minded and plant-minded colleagues get steered to an answer both can live with.

Socially observant: You track how your team is doing without waiting for someone to raise a hand. If someone starts pulling back, the President and HR hear it from you early.

Anticipates: Stays ahead of the work, so decisions get made on schedule and with the information already in hand.

Pragmatic about process: High standards for safe, documented, repeatable procedure, held for what it produces rather than for its own sake. A decades-old process is open to renegotiation when the data supports it.

Takes ownership: A missed date, a failed batch, a cost that came back wrong. Diagnosed and fixed, and leadership never hears it through the grapevine.