Automation Manager

Posted Tuesday, August 11, 2026 at 10:00 AM

Position Title: Automation Team Manager

Department: PUMA Works

Reports to: Director of PUMA Works

Direct Reports: Automation programmers, project coordinator, and support staff assigned to the automation team

Compensation: Salary starting range $80,000 - $130,000;
Commensurate with Skills and Experience

Hours: Full-time Monday
- Friday, 8:30am - 5:00pm, 40 hours per week; plus on-call rotation

• Three weeks of paid vacation
• Eight & a half paid holidays per year
• Two paid flexible holidays per year
• ICHRA Health Insurance Reimbursement
• 100% Employer Paid Life Insurance
• 100% Employer Paid Medical Clinic Membership or Cash Equivalent (for Field Staff) for employees and dependents
• Other benefits accrue over the first 3-24 months, including: additional paid vacation, 401k with company matching, and quarterly profit share.

Place of Work: Tech Hub
- Redding, CA.

Maas Energy Works (MEW) is the leading developer and operator of on-farm, waste-to-energy systems in the United States. The Company designs, develops, constructs, and operates biogas renewable energy generation systems, primarily on dairy farms. Our projects include anaerobic digesters, biogas-powered electric generation, and renewable natural gas upgrading.

MEW is hiring an Automation Team Manager to lead the people and the workflow of our automation and programming team. This is a people-first leadership role. You will grow the careers of a team of PLC and SCADA programmers, balance their workloads, and keep programming tickets and projects moving to completion across a portfolio of digester and RNG facilities.

You will bring enough technical depth to sit in a troubleshooting conversation and contribute to solving the problem - but you will not set the team's technical direction. That responsibility belongs to the Technical Lead.

The ideal candidate has developed technical people before, holds a team accountable without micromanaging it, and takes satisfaction in removing obstacles so engineers can do their best work.

This position pairs with a Technical Lead. Both roles report to the Director of PUMA Works as co-leads of the automation team. The division of responsibility is deliberate and explicit:

• This role owns: people development, performance management, hiring, work assignment and loading, capacity planning, ticket and project throughput, scheduling, on-call rotation, timesheet and PTO approval, cross-department coordination, and escalation.
• The Technical Lead owns: technical direction, architecture and platform decisions, programming standards and conventions, code and configuration review, and the technical approach taken on any given project or ticket.

The Automation Team Manager does not direct the team on technical strategy, override technical decisions, or serve as the final technical authority. When technical and delivery priorities conflict, the Manager and the Technical Lead resolve it together and escalate to the Director when they cannot.

• Manage, coach, and develop a team of automation programmers
• Hold consistent one-on-one meetings focused on growth, obstacles, and career direction
• Build individual development plans and identify training, certification, and stretch‑assignment opportunities for each team member
• Write and deliver performance reviews; set clear expectations and address performance issues early and directly
• Build a team culture that reflects MEW's values - trustworthy, effective, generous, fulfilled, innovative

• Assign programming tickets and project work across the team based on skill, development goals, and available capacity
• Maintain a clear view of who is working on what, and rebalance when priorities shift
• Forecast capacity against the incoming project pipeline and flag staffing gaps to the Director
• Coordinate with Project Management, Operations, Engineering, and Construction to sequence automation work against site schedules and commissioning dates

• Own the health of the team's ticket queue in Click Up -…