Head of Deployments

Job Description

Job Description

Machines learned to understand language. We’re teaching them to understand matter.

Forty percent of global manufacturing happens through physical and chemical processes inside pipes, tanks, and reactors. Despite decades of industrial automation, much of what happens inside them remains remarkably invisible. Manufacturing is the most ubiquitous and foundational sector in global economy, yet the way factories are fundamentally run have used the same control philosophies, manual operations, and legacy software for the past 60 years.

Laminar deploys state-of-the-art patented sensors and edge hardware directly into live production environments, generating data that didn’t previously exist to build foundation models deployed in factory floors that understand chemistry, composition, quality, and material state in real time. We use that understanding to run autonomy and rethink how things are made.

The last generation of industrial automation taught machines to execute instructions reliably. The next will teach them to understand the processes they control and run autonomously, adaptively, and agentically: higher quality, safety, more efficiently, sustainably, and productively. 

That future is already taking shape. Today, Laminar works with 7 of the world’s 10 largest food and beverage manufacturers and operates across hundreds of factories globally across six continents. Our systems have materially reduced waste, cut manufacturing downtime, saved water, chemicals, energy, and helped prevent safety and quality failures. Our technology has gained international recognition, from being selected as a 2026 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, Gold 2026 Edison Award, Unilever Startup of the Year, to Innovator Awards by both Coca-Cola and AB InBev, and more.

We are backed by tier-one investors in physical AI to make intelligent, self-improving production the new standard for industry.

Join us to build what makes matter intelligible, and the intelligible controllable.

The Role

We're hiring a Head of Deployments to build and run the organization and operating system that takes every Laminar deployment from signed commitment to successful completion against the agreed account success criteria — predictably, repeatably, and at increasing scale. You own the deployment portfolio, the team that delivers it, and the speed and quality of execution across customers, plants, and geographies.

You will build the people, leaders, processes, playbooks, partners, KPIs, resource model, and operating cadence that allow the team to manage many deployments in parallel without bottlenecks. You will set goals, forecast capacity, allocate resources, review project portfolio health, remove systemic blockers, and step into strategic customer situations or escalations when your involvement materially changes the outcome.

You bring plant-floor credibility and executive presence, with a practical understanding of how industrial technology gets installed, integrated, validated, and adopted in complex manufacturing environments. You will use that experience to make Laminar's deployment model increasingly standardized, partner-enabled, efficient, and ready to scale from individual lines to global enterprise rollouts. You will partner closely with the Value Realization team so each deployment is delivered in a way that enables the agreed customer outcomes to be measured and validated.

What You Will Do

• Build and develop the deployment organization. Recruit, coach, and develop FDEs, Program Managers, and future team leaders. Define roles, ownership, performance expectations, and career paths so the organization becomes stronger as it grows.
• Own the deployment portfolio. Manage priorities, timelines, dependencies, risks, and escalations across active deployments. Establish a consistent cadence for portfolio reviews, risk management, retrospectives, and executive reporting.
• Build the Laminar Deployment System. Create repeatable processes, stage gates, customer-readiness requirements, checklists, templates, acceptance criteria, escalation paths, tooling, and playbooks that make deployment quality consistent across customers and geographies.
• Set goals and run the business by KPIs. Define the deployment scorecard — including cycle time, milestone and schedule adherence, backlog, quality, productivity, and attainment of agreed success criteria — and use it to identify bottlenecks and continuously improve execution.
• Own capacity and resource planning. Forecast deployment demand, team capacity, skills coverage, geographic needs, and hiring requirements. Allocate resources across projects, balance utilization, and determine where partners should extend Laminar capacity.
• Build a scalable partner model. Operationalize system integrators and mechanical/electrical implementers with clear ownership, qualification standards, handoffs, training, and quality controls so external capacity accelerates delivery without compromising outcomes.
• Lead strategic governance and escalations. Engage plant leaders and senior executives where needed to align on rollout plans, resolve major blockers, and defend results — while keeping day-to-day execution owned by the team. Work with Product and Engineering to eliminate deployment friction at the source.
• Partner with Value Realization. Ensure each deployment is configured, instrumented, and executed to meet the success criteria established for the account and to enable the Value Realization team to measure, validate, and communicate customer impact. Deployments owns delivery against the criteria; Value Realization owns the value methodology and customer value narrative.

About You

Must-haves

• You've built and led a deployment, professional-services, field-engineering, implementation, or similar organization — not just managed projects yourself.
• You have hired, coached, and developed teams that can run multiple complex deployments in parallel without depending on you for every decision.
• You have direct experience deploying technology on the shop floor of large enterprise manufacturers and understand plant operations, engineering, quality, IT/OT, installation, validation, and adoption.
• You have managed a portfolio of complex, multi-site or global deployments with committed timelines, competing resource demands, and executive visibility.
• You have created repeatable deployment processes, playbooks, metrics, and operating cadences that improved speed, predictability, and quality as volume increased.
• You are strong at resource and capacity planning and can translate pipeline and rollout demand into staffing, partner, and hiring requirements.
• You can translate account success criteria into clear deployment requirements and communicate credibly with plant leaders, VPs of Operations, and C-level sponsors.
• You are willing to travel internationally to customer sites, particularly for major rollouts, operating reviews, and escalations.

Strong pluses

• Experience in process manufacturing, food & beverage, brewing, CPG, chemicals, pharma, or similar continuous/batch environments.
• Background at an industrial IoT, automation, manufacturing software, or operational technology company, or as an operator in continuous improvement / operational excellence / digital manufacturing.
• Experience building partner-enabled delivery models using system integrators, installers, or other third-party implementation capacity.
• Fluency in plant-floor metrics such as OEE, yield, throughput, first-pass quality, capacity, utility consumption, material loss, and downtime.

Why This Matters

Laminar is already deploying across six continents. The next constraint on growth is whether we can deploy faster, more predictably, and at far greater scale. The Head of Deployments will turn deployment from a collection of successful projects into a repeatable global capability. Success means more deployments completed on time, consistent attainment of agreed success criteria, greater team capacity, and a model that scales without requiring the Head of Deployments in every project.

Benefits

• Direct impact on product and culture.
• Comprehensive benefits package including Medical, Dental, Vision, Life Insurance, Disability, Transportation benefit, Health and Wellness benefit, and more.
• 401k plan with employer matching
• Equity
• Competitive salary and bonus opportunities.
• Dynamic and inclusive work environment.
• Opportunities for growth and professional development.
• Access to Greentown Labs' extensive network of cleantech startups.
• Transportation benefit for your commute
• A team that celebrates together from rooftop lunches, ping pong matches, Lunch & Learns, and regular team events

Learn How We Think

• Learn about our startup journey: Our Journey
• How we're combating climate change: AI-Powered Climate Tech
• A customer story: Unilever uses Laminar precision automation to cut time & water usage 

Our pay ranges are established per Pave Compensation Software. We’re also proud to offer equity in our fast-growing startup and one of the most comprehensive benefits packages among startups at our stage. Laminar pays 100% of the individual health insurance premium for HMO medical, vision, and dental, offers flexible PTO, a $90/month transportation benefit, a $65/month health and wellness benefit, FSA, 12 company-paid holidays, an employer-matching 401(k) (unheard of at this stage!), and Greentown Labs membership, among other valuable resources. (*subject to change)

There are many easier places to work on AI. Laminar is for people who want the hardest version of their discipline. Models here must survive contact with physics. Hardware must survive years of continuous industrial operation. Software must integrate with machinery built decades ago. Everything we build ultimately has to work on a factory floor.

We believe exceptional people should be given exceptional amounts of ownership. At Laminar, you will have the context to form your own view, the permission to challenge ours, and the resources to pursue the right answers, whatever technical or organizational boundaries stand in the way. There are few layers between identifying something important and changing it.

We’re fortunate to work with a small polymathic team of hardware and software engineers, chemists, AI researchers, factory operators, and go-to-market wizards who are unusually capable, curious, rigorous, ambitious, and low-ego. If that sounds like you, we’d love to meet you.

Our Interview Process

1. Phone screen with Laminar HR/Recruiter (15-20 minutes)

2. Intro call with Hiring Manager (30 minutes)

3. On-site interview, overview of tech, and interview/presentation with the Hiring Manager and a few team members. Depending on the role, a skills exercise that should take no longer than an hour to prep, would be sent ahead of time. We record your skills exercise to share with any team members who could not join the interview and/or with Founder's ahead of their Founder's Interview. If you are not local, we can conduct this virtually.

4. Finalists for Full-Time positions will have a Founder’s Interview in-person

Final steps:

Two professional references are requested, ideally one from your current organization and one who served as your Manager

If an Offer Letter is extended, a Background check is conducted

Laminar is committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. Even if you are unsure you are a perfect fit, we strongly encourage you to apply! If you're ready to play a key role in scaling a game-changing company that’s transforming the industrial sector and advancing sustainability, we want to hear from you.

* Please ensure you add the runlaminar.com domain to your safe senders list to ensure you receive our communications.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.