Pilot Plant Manager
manufacturing › Pilot Plant Operations · M3 — M3 — Senior Manager · Management
Manages the pilot plant team and daily operations to test and validate manufacturing processes before commercial scale-up.
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What this role is
Manages the pilot plant team and daily operations to test and validate manufacturing processes before commercial scale-up. At the Senior Manager (M3) level, the role owns multiple teams or a sub-function, multi-team execution and resourcing trade-offs, and drives sub-function outcomes. Manages managers and/or several teams.
What this level does
- Manages the operations and budget of the pilot plant department, responsible for equipment uptime, batch throughput, and process monitoring across multiple units.
- Leads scale-up activities from lab to pilot scale — including process transfer, troubleshooting, and process optimization — evaluating diverse issues and process trends.
- Drives plant readiness for new-product-introduction in alignment with process safety, quality, and technical requirements, coordinating functional and customer teams.
- Oversees compliance investigations, change management, and authoring of GMP documentation, ensuring the plant operates within regulatory and process-safety envelopes.
- Defines and leads effective process monitoring, data management, and process learning to feed improvements back into development and manufacturing.
- Knowledge applied
- Applies process-engineering and GMP knowledge to manage a pilot plant department's operations, budget, and lab-to-pilot scale-up activities.
- Complexity & problem solving
- Evaluates diverse process issues and trends; owns troubleshooting, optimization, and NPI readiness within process-safety and quality requirements.
- Collaboration & interaction
- Leads functional and customer teams; coordinates compliance investigations, change management, and GMP documentation across the department.
- Typical experience
- 5–7+ years managing pilot-plant professionals and budgets, with demonstrated scale-up and process-transfer track record.
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
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Source · canon-v2 cell + salary-benchmark (model)
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