Reports to: CEO Location: UK or US (frequent travel across all global factories)

About Isembard

Isembard is building the industrial backbone for aerospace, defence, space, and critical industries — a franchise of precision CNC (for now) factories run on our proprietary operating platform, MasonOS. We're scaling fast across the UK, US, France, and Germany, and we need someone who has actually run high-consequence, high-rate hardware production before not just managed a P&L around it.

The Role

This role owns the operating discipline of Isembard factories: the standard operating procedures (SOPs) that determine whether every factory (regardless of country, franchisee, or product line) runs to the same standard of quality, safety, and throughput.

This is not a policy-writing desk job. You will be on the shop floor, in the weld cell, on the machine, watching how work is actually done, then codifying it, training it, auditing it, and improving it — relentlessly, across hardware, software, process, and people. You'll be the person who turns "how Simon's team does it in the UK" and "how Justin's team does it in the US" into one coherent, provably better way of doing it everywhere.

You will work in close partnership with Quality (to ensure SOPs are audit-ready and certification-grade), the Franchise team (to ensure SOPs are franchisable, teachable, and enforceable across independently operated factories), and the Embedded Software team (to ensure SOPs are instrumented and enforced through MasonOS wherever possible, not just written on paper).

What You'll Do

SOP Authorship, Standardisation, Training and Improvement

• Write, own, and version-control the master SOP library covering manufacturing across all Mason Network factories.
• Extend SOP discipline beyond the shop floor into hiring, onboarding, and workforce qualification — defining what "trained and certified to run this cell" actually means, network-wide.
• Build SOPs that are legible to both a franchise GM in Hamburg and a machinist on their first week.

Training & Certification

• Design and run the training programs (including hands-on components of Isembard Factory Camp) that certify GMs, floor leads, and operators against SOPs before they touch production.
• Build a train-the-trainer model so SOP fidelity scales with the network without you personally being in every factory.

Audit & Enforcement

• Run a recurring audit cadence across every factory — process adherence, documentation accuracy, near-miss and non-conformance review — and hold franchisees and country GMs accountable to findings.
• Partner with Quality to ensure audit findings feed directly into corrective/preventive action (CAPA) loops and certification maintenance (AS9100 and customer-specific QMS requirements).

Continuous Improvement