Senior Supervisor, Pilot Plant Operations
manufacturing › Pilot Plant Operations · M2 — M2 — Manager II · Management
Senior supervisor overseeing daily pilot plant operations and the shift leads or operators who run small-scale process trials.
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What this role is
Senior supervisor overseeing daily pilot plant operations and the shift leads or operators who run small-scale process trials. At the Manager II (M2) level, the role owns an established team or sub-function, cross-project coordination and priorities, and drives group delivery and development. Manages a team; sometimes manages leads.
What this level does
- Leads a skilled team of pilot plant operators and technicians across routine and non-routine batch campaigns, owning tactical run schedules and shift coverage.
- Applies process knowledge to make improvements in plant performance and operating discipline, including creating and improving job procedures and writing safe work procedures.
- Coordinates cross-functionally with maintenance, lab, and quality staff to ensure equipment readiness and to support the scale-up of processes to manufacturing when appropriate.
- Participates in and directs the team's involvement in root cause investigations and process upset/crisis response activities assigned by the pilot plant technologist.
- Recommends changes in a manufacturing process to improve or produce final products, using judgment within established operating factors.
- Knowledge applied
- Applies deeper process knowledge to improve plant performance and operating discipline, authoring job and safe-work procedures and recommending process changes.
- Complexity & problem solving
- Exercises judgment within known operating factors; directs root-cause investigations and process upset/crisis response for the team.
- Collaboration & interaction
- Cross-functional cooperation with maintenance, lab, and quality staff to ensure equipment readiness and support scale-up to manufacturing.
- Typical experience
- 2–5 years in team leadership or pilot-plant specialist roles; typically 3+ years in a chemical, manufacturing, or industrial environment.
Skills at this level
- Pilot plant process operations and controls
- — Directs execution and monitoring of pilot-scale chemical batches on instrumented and PC-based control systems, applying chemical-engineering fundamentals to keep operations within safe operating parameters.
- Process safety and operating discipline
- — Enforces and improves pilot plant safety practice — lock out/tag out, safe work procedures, housekeeping, and process-upset/crisis response — and authors the job procedures that govern safe batch execution.
- Scale-up and technology transfer leadership
- — Leads bidirectional transfer of processes from small-scale development units to the pilot plant and from pilot to commercial manufacturing, driving new-product-introduction readiness across organizational boundaries.
- Process troubleshooting and optimization
- — Diagnoses process deviations during scale-up, runs root-cause investigations, and applies process learning to optimize batch performance and yield at pilot scale.
- GMP documentation and change management
- — Authors and reviews GMP documentation, leads compliance investigations, and manages change control so pilot operations meet regulatory, quality, and technical requirements.
- Process modeling and data science for scale-up
- — Develops, deploys, and scales mechanistic, hybrid, or data-driven models — using PAT tools and simulation software such as Dynochem, Aspen, or gPROMS with Python/R/Julia — and integrates them into plant systems to guide process design and scale-up.
- Process monitoring and data management
- — Defines and leads effective process monitoring and data-management systems that capture batch performance and convert it into process learning for development and manufacturing.
- Equipment readiness and maintenance coordination
- — Coordinates routine and preventive maintenance of pilot plant, warehouse, and lab equipment with maintenance functions to sustain uptime and campaign readiness.
- Team leadership and mentoring in pilot operations
- — Runs the plant without constant oversight while coaching and mentoring operators and specialists, making agile decisions and building bench strength across shifts and campaigns.
- Commercialization and economic evaluation of novel processes
- — Designs and operates pilot processes to commercialize novel technologies, focusing pilot activity on enterprise-level economic and sustainability outcomes through cross-scale process analysis.
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As of · 2026-07-30
Edition · canon-v2@2.1.0-complete
Source · canon-v2 cell + salary-benchmark (model)
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