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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.
As VP Optimization, you will own the optimization strategy and vision for Pelico, defining a multi-quarter roadmap for what to build in-house versus buy, sequencing technical bets, and setting the technical direction for the entire discipline. You'll be accountable to leadership for outcomes and serve as one of the company's senior technical voices with a seat at the strategy table.
Key responsibilities include:
- Building and leading an optimization team from the ground up: hiring, developing careers, setting technical and cultural standards, and owning performance and delivery.
- Representing Pelico's operations research expertise to the world through publications, speaking engagements, and partnerships with universities and research labs to build research and employer brand.
- Supporting commercial strategy by lending pre-sales credibility in strategic deals, winning over skeptical customers, and building senior technical relationships that drive revenue.
- Driving core optimization work: multi-objective allocation and recommendations beyond FIFO, North Star scoring and conflict-arbitration layers that align humans and AI agents, optimization under uncertainty (treating lead times and yield as distributions), and stock/safety-policy optimization from historical actuals.
- Owning trust and adoption by ensuring recommendations are explainable and validated against real plant behavior; managing the optimality-versus-runtime trade-off deliberately.
- Enabling AI-agent-actionable optimization by exposing the digital twin and scoreboard as clean, governed, explainable tools that agents can call 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 strong engineers in optimization techniques.
The role sits at the intersection of hard optimization science and practical manufacturing operations. You'll work across product, engineering, and commercial teams to embed optimization into the company's roadmap and strategy.
REQUIREMENTS:
- PhD in Operations Research, Applied Mathematics, or related field, plus 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; comfortable with off-the-shelf solvers (Gurobi, CPLEX, OR-Tools, Hexaly) and hand-crafting bespoke algorithms at scale (millions to hundreds of millions of records).
- Strong judgment in making exact-versus-heuristic and optimality-versus-speed trade-offs; drive to build a team and discipline, not just models.
- Comfort in an AI-native environment; ability to package optimization as tools for AI agent consumption.
- Hands-on coding skills; still the strongest in the room, not someone who has left the keyboard.
- Bonus: supply-chain and manufacturing planning depth (MRP, multi-level BOM, pegging, scheduling); experience packaging optimization for agent consumption.
