Quality Manager

Description

Come build quality on purpose.

Balanced Body builds Pilates equipment the way a master craftsman builds anything — nothing leaves the shop until it's right. Every reformer, tower, and accessory that leaves our Sacramento facility carries a promise to studios and instructors around the world — and we're looking for the person who makes sure that promise never breaks.

Balanced Body has been the world's leading manufacturer of premium Pilates equipment since 1976. We're headquartered right here in Sacramento, California, and we build more than equipment — we build the tools that help people move better, feel better, and enjoy their lives more. That mission starts on our production floor, and it depends on the quality of everything we ship.

This is a newly consolidated role — and a rare chance to build something from the ground up. Today, quality lives in pieces: incoming inspection here, in-process checks there, supplier quality somewhere else. We're bringing it all under one leader. As our Quality Manager, you'll be the single owner of quality across the entire flow, from the supplier's dock to the customer's door, turning quality decisions from one-off fire drills into a disciplined, criteria-driven system.

You'll be the voice of the customer inside our factory. Your standard isn't "does it match the drawing" — it's "would the customer be proud to own this".

Especially in year one, this is hands-on work. You'll be on the floor inspecting parts, writing the standards yourself, and working supplier floors directly — not just directing a team to do it. This is a player-coach role, not a seat where you lead exclusively through managers.

• Customer-facing quality: complaints, field failures, and warranty claims route through you — 8D reports, corrective actions, and closing the loop from field data back to the factory floor.
• Standards and decisions: author the written acceptance criteria for every part family, chair the Material Review Board, and give inspectors and technicians a clear, consistent rulebook to work from.
• The QMS: drive QT9 as a living system — CAPA pipeline, non-conforming product trends, audit readiness — and build the dashboard leadership actually looks at: cost of poor quality, first-pass yield, rework by supplier.
• Supplier quality: one end-to-end process from supplier quality agreements through first article and incoming inspection, with structured improvement programs for your highest-impact suppliers. Most of our roughly 1,200 suppliers are small, local shops with little or no formal quality system — you'll spend real time on their floors helping them build the processes and controls they don't have yet, not just auditing against ones they already do.
• Cross-functional leadership: a weekly quality/supply cadence with Supply Chain, and a team of inspectors, technicians, and supplier quality engineers who look to you for standards and coaching. Quality is the exclusive focus of this role today — EHS and Supply Chain are separate functions you'll partner with closely, not manage.
• Growth initiatives: quality plans for new product launches like the Luna Reformer, qualification of new manufacturing sources (including international operations), and a zero-gap quality transition during our upcoming facility move.

Requirements

• 7+ years of progressive quality experience in discrete manufacturing, including 3+ years leading a team — with real weight on hands-on, still-in-it experience rather than leading exclusively through managers.
• Hands-on ownership of a QMS (QT9 or equivalent) — CAPA, NCP, MRB, and audit management.
• Real supplier quality experience: FAI, PPAP or equivalent, supplier audits, and corrective action follow-through — including work with small or informal suppliers, not only large, sophisticated ones with established quality systems of their own.
• Direct customer-facing experience — complaint resolution, 8D reporting, and commitments made (and kept) to accounts.
• A knack for writing acceptance criteria that hold up in a high-mix, craftsmanship-driven environment.
• Comfort building your own metrics and dashboards in Excel;
  Power…