Laboratory Supervisor

The Laboratory Supervisor leads day-to-day operations of METER's Environment Research Lab. This is a hands-on, player-coach role: you personally run complex tests, lead the lab staff and interns who carry out the lab's routine work, schedule internal research, sales and marketing, and customer testing requests, and keep lab work moving through clear tracking systems.
You execute against test methods and specifications set by our scientific, engineering, and production staff.
A ground-floor opportunity. This lab is early in building its operating processes. You'll spend meaningful time in your first several months creating the documentation, procedures, and tracking workflows that don't fully exist yet, alongside running tests and leading the team. If you get energized by building structure from scratch, and then maintaining and refining that structure over time, this is the job.

This role will report to our Manufacturing and Production leadership.

The most important trait for this role isn't lab technique. Many people could come in and run the tests.
It's judgment about standard work: seeing where the lab is missing the process, documentation, or discipline a well-run lab would have, and putting it in place, even when that means working with senior colleagues to introduce something new.
You also supervise the work of teenage interns and ensure they follow strong lab processes.
Here's what that looks like.
A scientist asks for measurement data across a variety of soils.
You sit down with them and get the information you need to start the experiment.
You don't guess your way into it, and you don't let the request sit.
Then, you ensure the work gets done correctly and in a timely manner, whether you do it yourself, you coordinate the work with production staff members, or you assign it to one of the lab interns.
Finally, you ensure the results are documented and communicated well.
We're hiring for this judgment first, lab experience second.

We need an organized person who can run our lab efficiently; regularly make the right judgment calls; coordinate well with all stakeholder departments; build, maintain, and refine well-documented processes; communicate well with internal departments and external customers; and effectively supervise and mentor laboratory staff and high school and college interns.

• Manage the daily queue of requests from customers, our internal research team, and sales and marketing, while keeping due dates, status, and issues visible.
• Prioritize and schedule work for yourself, lab interns, and the production team members who run customer testing.
• Personally perform complex, non-routine, or first-time laboratory tests, and troubleshoot instrument and method problems.
• Lead the production team members who run the lab's routine testing day to day: assign tasks within the day, check their work for completeness, and raise performance or capacity issues with management.
• Check data and reports produced by production team members and lab interns for completeness before they are used in business decisions or sent to a customer, confirming required scientific sign-off has occurred.
• Make sure written work instructions are accurate and complete, get trained on them from a Product Scientist, then train and qualify the production team on them, with Product Scientists assisting.
• Keep the lab's tracking systems accurate and current.
• Coordinate incoming customer samples for commercial lab testing services: receipt, labeling, testing, chain of custody, scheduling, and turnaround communication.
• Maintain lab equipment in good working order, including routine calibration and troubleshooting, and flag equipment or capacity needs to management.
• Prepa…