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Pelico is a manufacturing orchestration platform that uses AI to connect fragmented supply chain, production, and quality data into a live operational picture for complex industrial operations. The company serves major manufacturers like Airbus, Boeing, and Safran, and has raised $72M from General Catalyst, 83North, and Serena with 300% YoY revenue growth.
You will lead Pelico's optimization strategy and build the company's optimization discipline from the ground up. This is a founding technical leadership role with significant scope: you'll define the multi-quarter roadmap for optimization (build vs. buy decisions, sequencing, strategic bets), own hiring and team development, and serve as a senior technical voice shaping product and company strategy alongside leadership.
Key responsibilities include:
- Owning the optimization vision and roadmap, accountable to leadership for outcomes and technical direction across the discipline
- Building and leading a new optimization team: hiring, developing careers, setting technical and cultural standards, and ensuring delivery
- Representing Pelico's OR capabilities externally through publications, speaking, and partnerships with universities and research labs to build research and employer brand
- Supporting commercial strategy by providing pre-sales credibility, winning over skeptical customers, and building senior technical relationships
- Driving core optimization work: multi-objective allocation and recommendations, North Star scoring and conflict-arbitration layers for human-AI alignment, optimization under uncertainty (distributions for lead times and yield), and safety-policy optimization from historical data
- Ensuring trust and adoption by managing the optimality-vs-runtime trade-off, keeping recommendations explainable, and validating against real plant behavior
- Enabling AI agents to consume optimization tools: exposing the digital twin and scoreboard as clean, governed, explainable APIs for agents to read plans, simulate actions, score outcomes, and act under human-in-the-loop gates
- Leading by example: authoring models and specs, writing and reviewing code, and mentoring engineers in optimization techniques
The role sits at the intersection of hard optimization science and practical manufacturing operations. You'll work with exact solvers (Gurobi, CPLEX, OR-Tools, Hexaly), metaheuristics, and reinforcement-learning-style formulations where the digital twin is the environment and the North Star objective is the reward. The optimization problems are multi-objective, continuous, reactive, and increasingly multi-agent with order-dependent outcomes and arbitration requirements.
REQUIREMENTS:
- PhD in Operations Research, Applied Mathematics, or related field with a senior track record solving real optimization problems in industry
- Recognized thought leadership demonstrated through publications, patents, talks, or open-source contributions; authority from solving genuinely hard problems
- Deep production experience across combinatorial optimization (MILP/LP/CP), metaheuristics, and simulation; equally comfortable with off-the-shelf solvers and hand-crafted algorithms at scale (millions to hundreds of millions of records)
- Strong judgment on exact-vs-heuristic and optimality-vs-speed trade-offs; drive to build a team and discipline, not just models
- Comfort in AI-native environments; ability to package optimization as tools for AI agent consumption
- Hands-on coding skills; remain the strongest technical contributor in the room
- Bonus: supply-chain and manufacturing planning depth (MRP, multi-level BOM, pegging, scheduling); experience packaging optimization for agent consumption
