Operations Manager

About the job

We're looking for an Operations Manager to run the day-to-day machinery of a fast-scaling robotics company — procurement, vendors and logistics, facilities, finance coordination, and people operations — so our engineers can stay focused on building intelligent machines. You will own the operational backbone: the systems, vendors, and rhythms that turn a growing lab into a company that ships reliably.

This is a hands-on, broad role, not a desk of process for its own sake. One week you're clearing a customs hold on imported sensors, the next you're planning an office move, reconciling a grant claim, and getting a new hire's accounts and contract sorted before their start date. You need to be comfortable owning many threads at once, closing loops without being chased, and building light process only where it earns its keep.

What you'll do

- Own procurement end to end: source and negotiate with vendors for robot components, lab equipment, and services; raise and track purchase orders; keep a clean record of what's ordered, approved, paid, and delivered

- Manage logistics and shipments — local and international — including imports, customs clearance, and coordination with freight and delivery partners

- Run facilities and the office: space planning, seat allocation, access control, equipment, and relocations; keep the physical environment working as the team grows

- Coordinate finance operations with the finance team: invoices, reimbursements, payment runs, contractor invoicing cycles, and vendor settlements — making sure submissions hit processing deadlines so people and vendors are paid on time

- Administer grants and government-agency programs: prepare and reconcile claims, track corrections and deadlines, and keep documentation audit-ready

- Support people operations: onboarding logistics, contracts, IT accounts and access provisioning, and coordination with HR so new joiners are productive on day one

- Establish the operational cadence — reporting, trackers, and reviews — that gives leadership a clear, current view of what's open and what's blocked

- Build and improve lightweight processes and tooling for the above, and own the vendor and supplier relationships that the company depends on

What we're looking for

- 2–5 years in operations, program/ops management, or a comparable role, ideally in a hardware, robotics, manufacturing, or fast-moving startup environment

- A track record of owning procurement and vendor relationships, including negotiation and managing the full order-to-delivery cycle

- Financial literacy: comfortable with purchase orders, invoices, reimbursements, budgets, and working alongside a finance function

- Strong coordination across functions — you can keep engineering, finance, HR, and external partners moving toward the same deadline

- High agency and reliability: you close loops, anticipate what's about to break, and don't let things sit silently

- Excellent written communication and organization; you keep clean records and crisp status

- Comfort operating with ambiguity and evolving scope in an early-stage company

Nice to have

- Experience in a robotics, hardware, or deep-tech startup, or in a manufacturing/lab operations setting

- Familiarity with Singapore's grant and agency ecosystem (e.g. SGInnovate, EDB, IMDA, BCA) and grant-claim administration

- Logistics, customs, and import/export experience, especially for electronics or hardware components

- Facilities or office build-out / relocation management

- Experience setting up operational tooling (procurement trackers, asset registers, onboarding workflows)

- Exposure to government, enterprise, or facilities-management customers and their procurement requirements

Who you are

- You are the person who quietly makes everything run — and people notice when you're not there

- You think in systems and deadlines: you know what has to happen by when, and you work backward from there

- You're resourceful and unblock yourself; an unfamiliar customs form or a new vendor is a problem to solve, not a reason to wait

- You hold many threads without dropping them, and you'd rather over-communicate status than leave people guessing

- You want to help build the operational foundation of a company defining what intelligent machines mean for facilities in Southeast Asia and beyond

What we are looking to build

• An operations function that scales with the company — procurement, logistics, facilities, finance coordination, and people ops running as dependable systems rather than firefights — so that as we grow our fleet, our team, and our deployments, the operational backbone holds and the engineers building our robots never have to wonder whether the basics are handled.