Finishing Department Supervisor

Job Description

Finishing Department Manager

Paint Sandblast Glazing Shipping | Weldwork LLC | Full-Time, On-Site

Weldwork builds custom architectural steel and glass — interior steel doors, shower enclosures, wine rooms, decorative panels, and one-off bespoke metalwork — for the luxury residential and hospitality markets. Everything we make is built to order in our Detroit-area shop and installed in homes, hotels, and restaurants where the finish is the first thing anyone notices. We also maintain a showroom in the D&D Building in New York City.

We are growing fast, and we are hiring the person who will own the back half of our shop.

The Finishing Department Manager runs everything that happens after fabrication: sandblast, paint, glazing and assembly, and shipping. These four departments turn raw fabricated steel into a finished, glazed, crated product that arrives at a job site flawless and on schedule. You own that entire stretch — the people, the throughput, the quality, and the on-time delivery.

This is a hands-on leadership job, not a desk job. You will be on the floor every day, moving between the blast booth, the paint line, the glazing benches, and the shipping dock, solving problems in real time and keeping product flowing.

You will lead a team of five: one sandblaster, one painter, and three team members in shipping and glazing who handle glazing, hardware installation, crating and pallet building, and checking in glass and hardware. This is a tight crew, which means you need to be able to step in and work a station yourself when the schedule demands it.

• Schedule daily blast capacity against the fabrication feed and the paint line so nothing starves and nothing stacks up.
• Own surface prep quality — profile, cleanliness, and timing between blast and coating so adhesion and rust prevention are never in question.
• Maintain media, equipment, filtration, and booth upkeep; keep PPE and safety compliance tight.

• Manage the liquid paint line and our patina finish program across our full range of dark, medium, and light finishes.
• Hold color, sheen, film build, and cure standards consistently across production runs and repeat clients.
• Own finish QC and rework: catch defects at the booth, not at the job site.
• Manage paint inventory, mixing, spray equipment, and booth maintenance.

• Run the glazing and assembly department — glass set into steel frames, glazing tape, stops, screws, and hardware installation.
• Plan labor around product complexity. A fullview panel with one sheet of glass and a true divided lite door with sixteen lites are not the same job, and your schedule needs to reflect that.
• Coordinate glass supply, staging, and breakage/replacement so glass availability never becomes the constraint.
• Own final assembly quality: reveals, alignment, hardware operation, and overall fit and finish before anything gets crated.

• Own packaging, crating, and load planning for heavy, fragile, high-value custom steel and glass.
• Schedule freight and coordinate delivery dates with sales, project management, and clients across the country.
• Drive damage rates down and on-time delivery up; own the claims process when something does go wrong.
• Verify completeness against the order before it ships — hardware, glass, finish, and all components accounted for.

• Lead, schedule, train, and develop a five-person finishing crew.
• Cross-train the team so blast and paint are not single points of failure when someone is out or volume spikes.
• Set and track daily and weekly output targets for each department and report against them.
• Work shoulder to shoulder with fabrication, project management, and sales to keep the whole shop moving.