Director of Deployment

Job description

At Gigaton, we’re on a mission to cut **gigatonnes** of carbon emissions from the world’s biggest emitting industries (like cement, steel and glass), by building autonomous AI control and optimisation systems that learn and leverage the physics of manufacturing. Our products run heavy industrial plants more efficiently, more stably, and with lower emissions in real time - laying the foundation for the next industrial revolution. We are a team of scientists, engineers, builders, and operators who love hard problems, have high standards, and want to make change happen in the physical world. We care about deep tech, but we care even more about whether it delivers cost and carbon impact in a live plant, with real people, under real constraints. With Gigaton, you’ll solve really tough problems in places few people ever get close to, and build something that *actually* helps the planet. Are you up for the challenge? ### **About the role** We're looking for a **Director of Deployment** to lead our **Solutions** team, the engineers who get our product live in industrial customers' plants, and to make every deployment faster, better and more reliable than the last. You'll be accountable for every deployment we run, and be the senior escalation route, for our team and our customers, when something gets stuck. This is a new role, and a leadership role, but a hands-on one. You'll coach our solutions engineers and leaders as they own deployments and customer relationships themselves, and step in yourself when a plant needs it. You'll work with Product, Machine Learning and Engineering to decide what goes back into the core product, so every plant is faster than the last. ### **What will this role achieve?** **The goal:** Take Gigaton from 9 plants live to 50 by the end of 2027, with every new plant going from signed contract to the end of evaluation in 8 weeks. **Outcome – 50 plants live.** You've taken us from 9 plants to 50 by 31 December 2027, across our customers worldwide. You've planned how many engineers we need and which teams new joiners go into, tracked the health of the whole portfolio every week, and stepped in early when a deployment started to drift. **Outcome – 8 weeks from contract to results.** Today a plant takes about six months to reach evaluation. You've cut that to 8 weeks end to end, and published the numbers that prove it. You've done it by turning repeated human work and customer-specific work into product, built with Product and Engineering. Each plant now needs half the people it did when you joined. **Outcome – a grip on results.** Before we start, every plant has agreed with us what success looks like and whose data counts. You've balanced the need to hit our timelines with the need to pass evaluations, pausing a plant that isn't ready rather than letting it fail, so every evaluation has passed first time. When something has gone wrong, you've found the root cause fast and fixed it, so we only make each mistake once. **Outcome – a team of superstars that keeps growing.** You've designed the team that delivers 50 plants and grown it to the size your design needs, hiring people who raise our bar. You've coached it actively: your leaders run high-performing teams, every engineer is autonomous, happy and smashing it for our customers, and everyone in Solutions can name what they've got better at because of you. We haven't lost anyone we wanted to keep. **Outcome – customers who trust us at every level.** Every plant has a clear owner, and an escalation route that solves problems before they reach our exec team. You've built a clean handover from Sales and a voice for Deployment in which plants we take on. **Outcome – post-sales solved.** With our sales leader, you've set up how we run every plant after evaluation, and it works, with clear responsibilities mapped out. Model upkeep, support and retraining are handled. Expansion contracts and upsells run through the same model: each one has a clear owner, and we spot opportunities before the customer raises them. ### **What a great fit looks like** - You have **deployed early AI product into business customers**, hands-on and alongside engineers. You worked out what would create value and decided what was worth building. Not onboarding customers onto a product that was already finished. - You have **turned bespoke work into repeatable product**. You decided which customer-specific features and fixes belonged in the core product, and you can show the numbers: deployments that got faster, with fewer people, while volume grew. - You have **earned the trust of customer leaders**, from site head up to executive level, been their escalation point and unblocked hard problems. You're credible because you've built and shipped. - You have **grown a delivery team** and made the decisions that came with it, including hiring and performance management. You've designed the team's structure as it grew. - You're **a coach who was recently a quarterback**. You can still step in, but you know you'll have more impact by building a team that doesn't need you to. - You **agree what success means** with a customer before you start, and you prove it with numbers. - You **notice early signs of trouble** and raise them with urgency, and you use judgement to tell what needs action and what doesn't. - You're happy to **travel to our plants** worldwide, about a quarter of the time and more in your first few months: to build relationships with customer leaders, coach your team on site and learn how our plants run. ### **You'll excel if** - You have **managed managers**, or grown an engineer into a team lead. - You have worked in a **forward-deployed or deployment strategist model**, where small teams embed with customers. - You have **set up post-sales or account management** for a B2B product. - You have deployed software into **physical operations**: plants, factories, utilities, energy assets or similar. - You care about **decarbonising energy intensive industries**. ### **Details** - **Reports to:** Noah Miller, COO - **Team:** our Solutions team of solutions engineers and two team leads, which you'll lead and grow - **Location:** London, at least 2 days a week in the office, with about 25% travel to customer plants - **Visa sponsorship:** available if required 💡 *You are not expected to check every box, and we’d love to hear from you even if your experience isn’t an exact match.* We’re building a team that reflects the world we want to change. Our people come from different countries, cultures and experiences, and we think that’s one of our biggest strengths. We’re committed to creating a workplace where everyone feels safe, respected and celebrated. No matter your background, if you’re excited by what we do, we want to hear from you. ## **The interview process - subject to change** We aim to go from first call to offer in three weeks. 1. **First call** with our Talent team (30 minutes) 2. **Interview with Noah**, our COO, walking through your career (60 minutes) 3. **Work sample day.** We share real data from one of our plants. You spend 30 minutes with two of our team leads, then present how you'd run the deployment and how you'd shape the team for 50 plants. This includes a conversation about how you lead people. We'll give you the background you need beforehand. 4. **Operating Principles interview** with a panel from across Gigaton 5. **Final interview** with Josh, our CEO 6. **References**, then an offer We believe hiring is a two-way process. Just as we’ll reference-check candidates before making a final offer, we encourage you to reference-check *us* by chatting to team members you haven’t yet met. Ask anything. We’ll answer with Concrete Honesty. Once interviews are done, we’ll move quickly to a decision, and we’re always happy to give feedback at any stage. **In return for your hard work, we’ll give you** 📈 **Equity in the company:** When we win, you win. You’ll get share options, so you’re part of our journey from the inside. 🕰️ **Flexible working** We trust you to know how and when you work best and to work that out with your team. 🌴 **30 days of holiday (plus bank holidays).** Rest is productive. Take the time you need to recharge 🪙 **A generous pension scheme.** We’re planning for the future in more ways than one. **Our Operating Principles** ↗️ **Go Gig or Go Home**: High Bar, All In. What we do matters to humanity, to our customers and to each other. We hold ourselves to an extraordinarily high bar and bring the urgency this mission requires. 🏭 **Concrete Honesty**: Be honest. As concrete forms the foundation of our world, genuine honesty and transparency are the bedrock of our culture. 🦾 **Autonomous Ownership**: High agency, high ownership. We build systems that take control and make things better. We do the same: see it, own it, drive it. 😄 **Cement it with Kindness & Fun**: Have fun, be kind. We're here to extend Earth's life, but ours is still limited. We want to enjoy the ride. To see these in full, go to [Gigaton’s Operating Principles](https://gigaton-technologies.notion.site/gigaton-s-operating-principles) Notion page.