Director of Operations

Job Description

Job Description

Director of Operations

Techbros | Scottsdale, AZ | On-site, full-time

The short version

Retired IT hardware arrives at our dock in unpredictable volume and unknown condition. It leaves as either a sanitized, graded, documented asset with resale value or as properly recycled material with a paper trail behind it. Everything between those two points is yours. We are looking for someone who has run a floor before, who reads a throughput number and knows immediately whether it is good, and who has audit experience.

Who we are

Techbros handles IT asset disposition, electronics recycling, data sanitization, and refurbishment out of Scottsdale. Corporate clients, government agencies, and enterprise IT departments send us hardware they cannot simply throw away: laptops with patient data, servers coming off lease, phones from a fleet refresh, whole floors of equipment from an office consolidation. Two things make this industry different from general warehousing. The first is that our product is partly documentation. A client is buying the certificate of data sanitization and the chain of custody record as much as the physical removal. The second is that our margin lives in judgment calls: whether a device gets refurbished or parted out, which grade it earns, which channel it sells into. Volume alone does not make us money. Volume processed correctly does. We are certified and audited against R2v3, ISO 9001, 14001, 45001, 27001, ITAR, and NAID AAA (more to come, including CMMC and SOC2) with obligations on top.

What you will be measured on

This role has real numbers attached to it, and we will review them with you on a set cadence rather than at an annual review.

• Units processed per labor hour, by department
• Fully loaded labor as a percentage of revenue, tracked biweekly against target
• Overtime hours per employee per week against a ceiling
• Intake to manifest turnaround time
• Backlog age, meaning how long the oldest untouched pallet/item has been sitting
• Rework and regrade rate
• Cost per unit processed, including consumables, freight, and downstream disposal
• Audit findings and safety incidents, where the target is zero and anything else gets a root cause

What the work looks like

Most of your week is spent on the floor, not at a desk. You are walking stations, watching where work piles up, and figuring out whether the constraint today is people, equipment, staging space, or a procedure nobody follows anymore.

The other part is planning. Volume in this business sometimes arrives in lumps. A single client decommission can triple a week's intake, and you need to know that is coming before the truck does. That means staying close to sales on the pipeline, deciding what gets staged versus processed immediately, and staffing to the forecast instead of reacting to the backlog.

Concretely, the scope includes:

• Intake, data sanitization, testing, grading, refurbishment, recycling, and outbound shipping
• Warehouse and technical supervision, who report to you, plus the full floor headcount underneath them
• Hiring, cross-training, scheduling, and performance management across shifts
• Safety: PPE, material handling, racking and lift practices, incident reporting and follow-through
• Facility layout, staging logic, material segregation, and downstream shipment scheduling
• Compliance evidence, SOP accuracy, and audit readiness as a standing condition rather than a project
• Equipment and capacity decisions, including making the case for spend

Your first ninety days

We would rather tell you the expectation now than have you guess at it.

Weeks one through four: learn the floor by working it. Sit at stations. Read the SOP library and note every place reality has drifted from the document. Do not change anything yet.

Weeks five through eight : take over the metrics. Own the numbers above, tell us which ones you distrust and why, and identify the two constraints costing us the most. Weeks nine through twelve: bring a plan. What you are changing, what you are leaving alone, what you need from the technology team, and what it should do to throughput and cost.

Where we want your thinking

The SOPs are written, the grading scale is defined, the manifest workflow pulls from our sanitization and diagnostic exports, and labor cost is tracked closely. We built all of it while the company was smaller, and it was built by operators rather than by career operations leadership.

So we are not handing you a blank page, and we are also not asking you to defend the status quo. What we want is someone who understands why a process exists before changing it, then tells us what will break at twice our current volume.

Worth knowing: our operational tooling is built in-house. If you need a different report, a new field, or an automation that saves our technicians ten minutes a unit, you ask our technology team and it gets built.

Who does well here, and who does not
Does well : people who are comfortable being on the floor all day, who like fixing systems rather than firefighting the same problem weekly, who document as they go.

Struggles here : people who need a fully staffed department before they can produce results, who treat compliance as somebody else's function, who avoid performance conversations, or who arrive with a playbook they intend to install regardless of what they find.

Must-haves

• Three or more years in warehouse, manufacturing, refurbishment, logistics, or recycling operations, with at least three years leading supervisors
• A specific operation you were accountable for, and numbers you can speak to that moved while you ran it
• Experience inside a certified or regulated environment where documentation and audits carried real consequences
• Fluency with operational math: cost per unit, labor as a percentage of revenue, capacity and staffing models
• Hiring, training, discipline, and termination experience you can speak to honestly
• Strong writing. SOPs, corrective actions, and incident reports are part of this job, not an afterthought
• On-site availability in Scottsdale, AZ. Full time.

Helpful, not required

• ITAD, electronics recycling, or refurbishment operations background
• Direct experience through an R2v3, ISO, ITAR or NAID AAA certification or surveillance audit
• Familiarity with NIST 800-88 and with platforms like WipeOS, Blancco, or Phonecheck
• Device grading, testing workflow, or resale channel experience
• Continuous improvement training you have actually applied
• Downstream vendor management experience
• Four-year degree, though what you have run matters more to us than where you studied

Compensation, schedule, location

Base salary with an on-target bonus tied to the operational metrics listed above, set according to experience. Monday through Friday day shift, with occasional early, late, or weekend coverage during large client projects. Ninety-day introductory period. On-site at Scottsdale, AZ.

You will report to top leadership and sit on the leadership team.

To apply

Send a resume and answer two things in a few sentences each:

1. Describe an operation you ran and give us the before-and-after numbers, whichever ones you were held to.
2. Tell us about an audit or inspection you personally went through and what it exposed that you did not know was wrong.

We read the answers before the resume.