Estimator - Custom Exhibits and Scenic Fabrication

Job Description

Job Description

Production Estimator

The Factory NYC is a custom fabrication and production company in Brooklyn. We build physical things for clients and we install them: museum exhibits, brand activations, luxury retail environments, public art, architectural millwork, and one off pieces that do not have a category yet. The deliverable is the built object, on site, on the date the client contracted for.

We are hiring a Production Estimator to own what the work costs to build.

Job Summary

You take a defined scope and produce the cost of building it: the labor by trade, the materials, the machine time, the vendors, the install and strike, and the risk you price in. That number is the foundation the company's pricing is built on and the basis the shop works to.

You cost the work. You do not price the client, and you are not asked to trim hours to reach a number somebody else needs. That separation is deliberate here and it is protected.

You also judge whether the work can be built the way it was drawn, in the time available, with the capacity we have, and you say so early when it cannot. Feasibility and capacity risk are yours to identify and escalate.

The work is varied. Very little of what we build is something we have built before in exactly that form, so the job is closer to reasoning about how a thing gets made than to pulling unit prices off a sheet.

You will report to the Director of Production and work alongside our lead estimator, who you will learn our methods and our cost history from. This is a full estimator seat, not a junior one. The bids assigned to you are yours.

Basic Duties and Responsibilities

• Review drawings, specifications and scope, and send back what is not defined well enough to cost honestly.
• Break a scope into what actually gets built and what each trade will spend on it, with a reason behind every number.
• Decide how the work gets built: sequencing, material selection, fabrication approach, and where a vendor or a subcontractor is the better answer than building it in house.
  
• Cost materials, machine time, vendor scope, logistics, installation and strike.
• Read the hours you have written against what the shop can carry, and raise bottlenecks and schedule risk to the Director of Production while there is still time to act on it.
  
• Take the build approach to the department managers on the larger jobs so the people who will build it have pressure tested the method before we commit to the number.
  
• Cost change orders with the same rigor as the original estimate, and turn them around inside the deadline the job needs.
• Hand the estimate to production and walk it with them, so the shop starts from what you actually intended.
  
• Build and maintain the estimating library and the record of what completed jobs really cost, and keep both current against real production results.
• Reconcile estimated against actual on every job you price, work out what drove the variance, and change the next estimate because of it.

What we are looking for

• Seven or more years estimating in custom fabrication, scenic production, construction or a comparable build environment
  
• Real knowledge of fabrication across more than one trade: carpentry, metalwork, finishing, assembly, and the machine side of CNC and digital fabrication. You know what a method costs in hours because you have watched it happen.
  
• The ability to read drawings, models and specifications, translate them into a buildable method, and catch what a drawing has not resolved before it gets priced.
  
• Judgment about capacity, department workload and lead times, and the willingness to say a schedule will not hold.
• Experience costing materials and vendor scope, and holding a vendor's number to what it was quoted against.
  
• Comfort working inside a proper production and quoting system rather than a spreadsheet on your desktop. We run a connected toolset and we use AI tooling in the estimating workflow. You do not need to have used ours, but you should want to work this way rather than around it.
  
• Organization enough to carry several bids on different deadlines without losing the detail on any of them, and communication clear enough to work with account management, project management, drafting, the shop floor and vendors in the same week.
  
• Bachelor's degree in engineering, construction management, industrial design or a related field preferred. Extensive hands-on fabrication and production experience is considered in its place.

Nice to have

Estimating across mixed trades in one shop rather than depth in a single one. Time actually spent on a shop floor. Experience building or maintaining an estimating library and reconciling it against completed jobs. Installation and strike estimating, including site conditions, access and crew size. Reading a drawing package well enough to mark it up, in AutoCAD, Rhino, SketchUp or comparable. Enough awareness of CNC and additive manufacturing to estimate machine time separately from the labor around it.

Additional details

This is and full-time and in person position, core hours 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., with extended hours when a bid deadline call for it. Primarily indoors.

Benefits: percentage stipend toward medical, vision and dental.

Paid time off. 

Savings incentive match plan for employees.

Compensation is discussed based on experience and qualifications.