Site Lean Leader: Lean Transformation & Kaizen Champion

Beehive Industries is dedicated to Powering American Defense by revolutionizing the design, development, and delivery of jet propulsion systems to support the warfighter. Through the integration of additive manufacturing, the company aims to meet the growing and urgent needs for unmanned aerial defense by dramatically improving a jet engine’s speed to market, fuel efficiency, and cost.

Founded in 2020, the company is headquartered in Centennial, Colorado, with additional facilities in Knoxville, Tennessee, Loveland Ohio, and Mount Vernon, Ohio. Beehive is committed to grow and advance the defense industrial base while manufacturing exclusively in the USA. This role will be located at our Blue Ash, Ohio facility.

Beehive Industries is seeking a Site Lean Leader to lead the deployment of the Beehive Production System and site-level Operations Excellence roadmap at one of our manufacturing sites. This role will be responsible for building lean capability, leading industrial engineering resources, coaching site leaders and teams, driving kaizen execution, improving daily management, and helping the site improve safety, quality, delivery, cost, and flow.

The Site Lean Leader will provide day-to-day leadership for the site’s Industrial Engineers and ensure their work is aligned to the highest-priority operational needs, including capacity modeling, labor planning, production flow, takt attainment, cell layout, WIP visibility, manufacturing readiness, and process improvement. This is a hands‑on leadership role for someone who can connect lean principles, industrial engineering, and practical shop‑floor execution in a high-growth manufacturing environment.

• Lead site-level deployment of the Beehive Production System and lean roadmap across manufacturing operations
• Provide leadership, direction, and prioritization for site Industrial Engineers and related Operations Excellence resources
• Align industrial engineering work to site priorities, including capacity planning, labor modeling, takt analysis, cell design, material flow, WIP strategy, and manufacturing readiness
• Serve as the primary lean coach and change agent for site leaders, supervisors, engineers, technicians, and operators
• Facilitate kaizen events focused on safety, quality, delivery, cost, productivity, flow, WIP reduction, and process stability
• Establish and improve daily management systems, including tier boards, SQDC reviews, escalation routines, action trackers, and visual controls
• Deploy and sustain core lean tools such as 5S, visual management, standard work, leader standard work, value stream mapping, waste identification, takt planning, flow, pull systems, and structured problem solving
• Partner with site leadership to define improvement priorities, kaizen funnel, project pipeline, and measurable performance targets
• Coach teams through structured problem solving using tools such as A3, 5 Why, fishbone diagrams, Pareto analysis, and root cause/countermeasure thinking
• Help identify and remove barriers to flow, including bottlenecks, rework, waiting, excess WIP, unclear ownership, poor visual management, and unstable processes
• Ensure Industrial Engineers support practical production system design, including layouts, standard times, capacity models, staffing models, routing assumptions, and throughput analysis
• Build site capability in Greenbelt-level improvement methods, kaizen execution, industrial engineering fundamentals, and practical lean thinking
• Support manufacturing readiness activities for new products, new processes, production cells, and rate scale-up
• Partner with operations, manufacturing engineering, quality, planning, supply chain, digital, and finance teams to improve end-to-end manufacturing performance
• Improve takt attainment, labor productivity, cell design, material flow, WIP visibility, constraint management, and throughput across the site
• Document before-and-after improvements, including baseline condition, countermeasures, measurable impact, ownership, and sustainment plans
• Develop training materials, playbooks, standard work, and simple tools that help employees understand and apply lean and industrial…