Head of Field Operations

Head of Field Operations, Critical Power

Please note that we are unable to provide visa sponsorship for this position.

Recruiting agencies: Proper Voltage does not accept unsolicited candidate submissions. Please do not contact any employees directly unless you have an existing engagement with the company.

About Proper Voltage

Proper Voltage is unlocking the next generation of battery technology across robotics, data centers, and defense.

We're building intelligent battery systems that make advanced chemistries (sodium-ion, lithium-titanate, lithium-silicon) work in products that were never designed for them. Humanoid robots can upgrade power systems without redesigning their entire platform. Data centers get safer, cheaper backup power. Drones and autonomous vehicles get higher energy density without lengthy integration cycles.

If you want to work on hard engineering problems that matter this is the place.

Job Overview

Proper Voltage is hiring its first Head of Field Operations to own everything between a product leaving our hands and a customer relying on it. The focus is critical power: UPS and battery storage at data centers and other sites that cannot lose power.

You are accountable for deployments being ready, service partners knowing what to do, customers getting decisive answers, and every field failure producing both a fast response and a permanent engineering lesson.

Installation and service are partner-led. Distributors install and service what they sell, and we have signed a nationwide installation and service partner that covers direct accounts and any site a distributor doesn’t take on. Customers’ own facility teams can take on defined work once certified. You set the standard all of them work to, certify their people before anyone touches our product, own warranty authorization, and decide what happens when something fails. We are not building an internal technician organization, and PV crews do not do installs.

You will own deployment readiness, commissioning and handoff, partner training and certification, SLAs, triage, warranty and RMA, service records, and the operating feedback loop into Engineering and Supply Chain. You will not personally solve every fault, but build the system that gives every fault an owner, a response target, a complete record, and a path to root cause.

What you'll build

• A deployment-readiness gate covering site readiness, commissioning, acceptance, customer handoff, spares, documentation, and support readiness for the first critical-power deployments.
• The operating model and Scope of Work for our service partner, covering geographic coverage, responsibilities, response times and SLAs, staffing, escalation paths, warranty pre-approval rules, spares, reporting, recovery of costs when the partner causes damage, and the scorecard you run it on, plus a qualified second partner behind it.
• A training and certification program that qualifies partner technicians, distributor teams, and customer facility crews before they work on our product, with a record of who is certified for what.
• One company-wide triage, warranty, and RMA process with severity levels, response targets, decision rights, rules for which monitoring alarms get a remote fix and which get a truck, customer communications, and serial-level service records.
• A recurring field-quality review with Engineering that converts failures into complete evidence, root-cause investigations, corrective actions, service bulletins, and product improvements.

Who this role is for

Someone who has personally built field operations for complex technical hardware and knows that good service starts before installation. You have managed high-severity customer incidents, held a contracted service provider to its SLAs, and turned messy field knowledge into a repeatable operating system.

When you apply, tell us about one document or program you personally authored end to end: work instructions, a training or certification program, an SOP, a runbook. What problem did it solve, and be ready to walk us through it. We weight that answer heavily.

This role is not a fit if

This is not a SaaS customer-success role. Electrical safety, firmware, commissioning, replacement parts, site access, product configuration, and uptime are real constraints.

It will not work for someone who hides behind service partners, passes tickets between customers and partners without making the call, routes every difficult issue directly to Engineering, measures success by closing tickets instead of restoring operation, or waits for perfect tooling before establishing ownership. It will also not work for someone who needs a template, a team, or a vendor before they can produce something. For the first year you are the author, the owner, and the reviewer.

Responsibilities

• Own deployment readiness, commissioning, acceptance, customer handoff, and the operating checklist that determines whether a site and support system are ready, including review of every partner commissioning and completion report. Keep each Sales account owner current on install status for their sites.
• Act as PV's contract manager for our nationwide service partner: write and co-sign each Scope of Work, set response times, staffing, and warranty pre-approval rules, run the monthly scorecard, approve invoices and change orders, and recover costs when the partner causes damage.
• Design the rest of the service network, including geographic coverage, spares placement, a qualified second partner, how distributors install and service what they sell, and the defined work customers’ own facility teams can take on once certified.
• Build and run the training and certification program. You certify the partner’s lead technicians and trainers, they deliver your program to their field teams, and you audit both. The same program certifies distributor install teams and the customer facility crews that handle first-line response.
• Own field triage, severity classification, escalation, containment, remote or on-site resolution, and customer communication during incidents, including which monitoring alarms get a remote fix and which get a truck.
• Own warranty operations and authorization, RMA, failure disposition, replacement, rework, and return-to-customer coordination within the approved warranty policy and technical criteria, with a backup so an approval at 2 a.m. doesn't wait on one person.
• Personally author PV's field-facing standards: installation and commissioning acceptance criteria, troubleshooting guides, training and certification content, and warranty and RMA procedures. Our service partner may draft site procedures to your standard; you approve them and PV owns them. We have no technical writing team, no learning function, and nobody downstream to polish a draft. You write the finished version.
• Own the warranty cost picture with Finance, including claim rate assumptions, cost per claim, recovery from partners at fault, the reserve, and the inputs for pricing extended warranty and maintenance plans.
• Define PV's first customer-facing service commitments, including response time, containment, restoration, uptime, repeat failures, partner performance, and RMA cycle time, and flow each one into our service partner's Scope of Work.
• Own the service workflow and serial-level record requirements, including the call on where that record lives. Partner service reports land in PV's system, not the partner's.
• Critical incidents don't keep business hours. You are the first call on major customer incidents, with a backup.
• Build the field-to-engineering evidence loop; Engineering owns technical diagnosis, root cause, corrective-action approval; service documentation is yours.
• Keep the internal team small. Internal hires support training, certification, and large projects, not installs. Build the operating budget, tooling, and hiring sequence as deployments scale, and justify each internal hire against what our partners can do.

Required Qualifications

• Eight or more years in field service, deployment operations, or technical customer operations for complex hardware. We weight having built this once more heavily than the number of years, so tell us about the build rather than the tenure.
• Experience with power electronics, energy storage, industrial automation, robotics, or similarly technical systems.
• Demonstrated success building a partner-led service model across distributors, integrators, or third-party field providers.
• Direct experience managing critical incidents, commissioning failures, warranty decisions, and RMAs.
• Enough technical fluency to work from diagnostic logs, electrical and system documentation, firmware information, and failure evidence without becoming a substitute for Engineering.
• Proven ability to establish SLAs, escalation paths, service records, and operating metrics from scratch, with clear recommendations and decisive follow-through.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with UPS systems, battery energy storage, data-center infrastructure, batteries, or critical-power products.
• Working knowledge of DC electrical safety practice (NFPA 70E, lockout/tagout) and time on site for commissioning of electrical systems.
• Experience building technician training, certification, and train-the-trainer programs.
• Experience defining service workflows for customer portals, remote monitoring, CRM, or field-service platforms.
• Background in a high-growth hardware company approaching its first scaled deployments.
• Base Salary: $210k to $250k depending on experience.
• Equity: Based on experience.
• Health, dental, and vision insurance.
• Flexible PTO with a generous holiday policy.
• In person in Carlsbad, with relocation required for candidates outside the area. Travel is front-loaded while you learn the product, see installations first hand, and get to know our service partner, distributors, and contract manufacturer, then settles as our partners carry the on-site work.

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