Strategic Manufacturing Account Director

Manufacturing advanced electronics requires understanding millions of signals generated across complex assembly processes. Instrumental builds systems that capture and analyze those signals — images, test results, and process data — enabling engineers to discover failures, identify root causes, and deploy production controls that improve yield and product maturity. Leading companies such as NVIDIA, Cisco, and Meta rely on Instrumental to accelerate new product development and scale manufacturing across global factories. Instrumental has become mission-critical for manufacturers building and scaling the next generation of AI infrastructure hardware.
In the past few quarters, our technology has become mission-critical for AI server manufacturers. We’re rapidly growing our global presence to enable deeper integrations into our customers’ complex manufacturing environments. We are seeking a technical leader with deep, hands-on electronics manufacturing expertise, proven leadership success in a startup, and a demonstrated ability to drive urgency, align teams, and deliver outcomes.
Key Responsibilities:

• Deliver Outcomes to AI Infrastructure Customers. Leverage Instrumental technology to provide measurable improvements to time-to-market, rack-to-data center capacity, bonepile avoidance, and debug acceleration. You will not inherit a team, so initially you will personally deliver these outcomes as you build the team that allows you to scale.
• Hiring and Team Management. Act as a hiring manager to build and coach a team of high-performing Field Deployed Engineers, ensuring all hires are top performers who demonstrate exceptional perseverance and resilience, are outcome-oriented, able to work with external stakeholders, and influence without authority. As your business grows, you will be managing a multi-level organization with a broader set of roles.
• Drive AI Infrastructure Strategy and Execution. Own the relationship and value delivery for Instrumental's most strategic AI Infrastructure customers (GPU brands, OEMs, and Hyperscalers). This includes driving alignment on objectives, scaling paths, and managing risks. You will work with our product and engineering teams to develop new capabilities.
• Deliver value to customers and drive platform engagement, owning 2-5 customers and a dozen factory sites, you will engage our customer’s cross-functional teams and their manufacturing partners in order to deliver on accelerated time to market for NPI and improved first pass yield in production. Engagement is key to value and requires experience driving change in organizations.
• Perform quarterly executive business reviews, presenting to customer senior executives to showcase the results and impact attained through the Instrumental platform. Leverage these reviews to spotlight potential expansions and drive alignment on strategic roadmaps. Build the slide-ware that tells a compelling value story based in data.
• Orchestrate Instrumental team members, in order to maximise value for customers. You will drive our C-Suite, Sales team, Product, Engineering, Data Quality analysts, and others on behalf of our customers. We expect you to teach us how to do our jobs better and drive excellence with team members who don’t report directly to you.

Qualifications:

• 3+ years of demonstrated success in a Director-level or equivalent role managing technical or engineering programs in hardware development and or electronics manufacturing, with experience presenting outcomes to the VP/C-suite level.
• 10+ years of total experience with electronics development and manufacturing, and a deep understanding of how to transform movement in specific KPIs such as failure analysis time, yield, throughput, and quality to business and operational value.
• Demonstrated success as a hiring manager with a focus on building teams exhibiting high-grit and high-ownership. Demonstrated ability to exit mishires quickly.
• Exemplary written presentation and verbal communication skills, with a knack for executive presentations—you enjoy crafting data-rich presentations that drive decisions.
• A strategic mindset, with the ability to set the right goal, build an operational plan, and deliver results. You embrace ambiguity and see every blocker as an opportunity to improve.
• Fluent Mandarin skills are a huge bonus

We’re a growing team that works collaboratively, supports each other, and is energized by having an impact. We work from our Palo Alto office at least 3 days a week and take any opportunity to travel to customer sites aroun