Finishing Department Supervisor

Job Description

Job Description

Finishing Department Manager

Paint · Sandblast · Glazing · Shipping | Weldwork LLC | Full-Time, On-Site

About Weldwork

Weldwork builds custom architectural steel and glass — interior steel doors, shower enclosures, wine rooms, decorative panels, and one-off bespoke metalwork — for the luxury residential and hospitality markets. Everything we make is built to order in our Detroit-area shop and installed in homes, hotels, and restaurants where the finish is the first thing anyone notices. We also maintain a showroom in the D&D Building in New York City.

We are growing fast, and we are hiring the person who will own the back half of our shop.

The Role

The Finishing Department Manager runs everything that happens after fabrication: sandblast, paint, glazing and assembly, and shipping. These four departments turn raw fabricated steel into a finished, glazed, crated product that arrives at a job site flawless and on schedule. You own that entire stretch — the people, the throughput, the quality, and the on-time delivery.

This is a hands-on leadership job, not a desk job. You will be on the floor every day, moving between the blast booth, the paint line, the glazing benches, and the shipping dock, solving problems in real time and keeping product flowing.

You will lead a team of five: one sandblaster, one painter, and three team members in shipping and glazing who handle glazing, hardware installation, crating and pallet building, and checking in glass and hardware. This is a tight crew, which means you need to be able to step in and work a station yourself when the schedule demands it.

What You'll Own

Sandblast

•    Schedule daily blast capacity against the fabrication feed and the paint line so nothing starves and nothing stacks up.

•    Own surface prep quality — profile, cleanliness, and timing between blast and coating so adhesion and rust prevention are never in question.

•    Maintain media, equipment, filtration, and booth upkeep; keep PPE and safety compliance tight.

Paint & Finish

•    Manage the liquid paint line and our patina finish program across our full range of dark, medium, and light finishes.

•    Hold color, sheen, film build, and cure standards consistently across production runs and repeat clients.

•    Own finish QC and rework: catch defects at the booth, not at the job site.

•    Manage paint inventory, mixing, spray equipment, and booth maintenance.

Glazing & Assembly

•    Run the glazing and assembly department — glass set into steel frames, glazing tape, stops, screws, and hardware installation.

•    Plan labor around product complexity. A fullview panel with one sheet of glass and a true divided lite door with sixteen lites are not the same job, and your schedule needs to reflect that.

•    Coordinate glass supply, staging, and breakage/replacement so glass availability never becomes the constraint.

•    Own final assembly quality: reveals, alignment, hardware operation, and overall fit and finish before anything gets crated.

Shipping & Logistics

•    Own packaging, crating, and load planning for heavy, fragile, high-value custom steel and glass.

•    Schedule freight and coordinate delivery dates with sales, project management, and clients across the country.

•    Drive damage rates down and on-time delivery up; own the claims process when something does go wrong.

•    Verify completeness against the order before it ships — hardware, glass, finish, and all components accounted for.

Leadership & Throughput

•    Lead, schedule, train, and develop a five-person finishing crew.

•    Cross-train the team so blast and paint are not single points of failure when someone is out or volume spikes.

•    Set and track daily and weekly output targets for each department and report against them.

•    Work shoulder to shoulder with fabrication, project management, and sales to keep the whole shop moving.

•    Identify bottlenecks and fix them — process changes, layout changes, tooling, or headcount.

•    Enforce safety standards and keep the departments clean, organized, and audit-ready.

What We're Looking For

Required

•    3+ years of supervisory or management experience in a light manufacturing, fabrication, or custom shop environment.

•    Direct hands-on experience in a shipping and glazing department — you have set glass, you have crated product, and you know what goes wrong.

•    Working knowledge of windows and doors: how they are built, how they are glazed, how they are hung, and how they perform.

•    General knowledge of home building and renovation — enough to talk credibly with builders, GCs, designers, and installers about how our product lands on their job site.

•    A track record of managing multiple departments or work centers at once and hitting schedule.

•    Comfort in a fast-paced, high-mix, custom environment where every order is different.

•    The attitude we are actually hiring for: urgency, ownership, and the willingness to push to get across the finish line. When a truck has to load Friday, you make Friday happen.

Preferred

•    Experience with industrial coatings, liquid paint, powder coat, or specialty/patina finishes.

•    Experience with abrasive blasting operations.

•    Background in steel, architectural metal, glass, millwork, or high-end custom building products.

•    Familiarity with ERP or shop-floor scheduling systems and basic reporting.

•    Lean, 5S, or continuous improvement experience.

•    Freight, LTL, and crating experience with oversized or fragile product.

Success in the First 90 Days

•     Days 1–30: Know every station, every person, and every current bottleneck in the finishing departments.

•     Days 31–60: Have daily output targets and a visible schedule running across sandblast, paint, glazing, and shipping.

•     Days 61–90: Measurably improved on-time shipping and reduced rework and freight damage, with a clear plan for the next stage of growth.

Physical Requirements & Environment

On-site shop environment with exposure to noise, dust, abrasive media, paint fumes, and temperature variation. Requires standing and walking for extended periods, lifting up to 50 lbs regularly, and comfort working around glass, steel, overhead lifting equipment, and forklifts. PPE required.

Why Weldwork

•    You will run a department that ships product into some of the best homes and hospitality spaces in the country.

•    We are in a real growth phase, and this role sits at the center of it — the ceiling here is high for the right person.

•    Direct access to ownership. Good ideas get implemented in days, not quarters.

•    Every job is custom. You will never run the same day twice.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary: $90,000 per year, with room to grow as the departments and the business scale.

[Insert benefits: health, dental, vision, 401(k), PTO, holidays] | [Insert schedule / shift]

How to Apply

Apply through Indeed with your resume. Tell us in a sentence or two about a time you had to push a department to hit a deadline that looked impossible.

\nCompany Description

We custom build high end luxury interior steel doors.

Company Description

We custom build high end luxury interior steel doors.