Head of Injection Molding (Mobile Industry)

Reports to the founders. Qualification: B.E./B.Tech or diploma in Plastics, Polymer, Mechanical or Production Engineering.

Molding is where our product starts, and where our cost is set. A part molded badly becomes a part printed badly, assembled badly and rejected at packing — by which point we’ve paid for all of it.

You’d own molding as a function: the floor, the process, the people, the capacity and the capital. That includes multi-material molding, which is a meaningful part of what we produce and a materially harder process than single-shot.

We are only considering candidates from the mobile handset industry

We want to be direct about this, so nobody wastes their time.

We make small, cosmetically critical parts: sub-millimeter wall sections, visible surfaces with no tolerance for sink or flow marks, a tight fit against a device, and cosmetic standards closer to consumer electronics than to general plastics. A part that would pass in most molding shops gets rejected here.

The discipline that produces that output is learned in the handset supply chain, and it doesn’t transfer quickly from elsewhere. Excellent molding experience in automotive, appliances, packaging, housewares or general engineering plastics is genuinely excellent — it just isn’t what this role needs, and we’d be setting you up to struggle.

So: you should have spent meaningful time molding handset housings, covers or cosmetic enclosures, at a handset OEM, a contract manufacturer or their tier-one supplier base. Adjacent consumer electronics enclosure work at the same cosmetic standard will also be considered.

The thing that actually limits this floor

We’re high-mix: many molds, frequent changes, moderate volume per run. In that environment the constraint usually isn’t cycle time — it’s changeover, and the scrap that follows it. Every tool change costs setup hours, then more shots before the process stabilizes. Across a week of changes, that’s a serious share of capacity spent producing nothing.

Most molding operations measure cycle time obsessively and changeover barely at all. We’d like someone who goes after it.

What you’d build

• Changeover discipline: SMED, prepared tooling, parallel setup, and a measured changeover time that comes down.
• Validated parameter sets for each mold, so a setter isn’t rediscovering the process each time, and a first-off routine that reaches stable quickly and records what stable looked like.
• Material handling discipline: resin dried to spec before it goes near a machine. Wet material causes cosmetic defects that get blamed on printing two stations later.
• A skill matrix for setters and operators, with certification before anyone runs unsupervised, and cross-training so capacity doesn’t depend on one person’s attendance.
• Real downtime and scrap data, coded by cause, so improvement has something to aim at.
• Capacity planning, and the case for new machines as we grow.

What you’d own

• Molding production across shifts, against the plan.
• Scrap and first-pass yield at the machine — your primary number.
• Process capability, parameter control and changeover performance.
• Machine utilization, uptime and maintenance coordination.
• Tool condition in production: shot counts, preventive maintenance, spare inserts and components, and escalation to the tool room before a tool fails rather than after.
• Tool repair and refurbishment decisions, with the cost case.
• Molding capacity decisions and capital proposals.
• The molding team — setters, operators, helpers and supervisors — including hiring and training.
• Safety, 5S and housekeeping.

What you’ll need

• 12+ years in injection molding, with function or plant-level ownership rather than shift supervision alone.
• Mobile handset molding experience — mandatory. Housings, covers or cosmetic enclosures, at a handset OEM or in its tier-one supplier base.
• Hands-on process capability: you can set a machine, read a short shot, and tell a setter what to change and why.
• Defect diagnosis — short shot, flash, sink, weld lines, warpage, splay, burn marks — by cause, not just by name.
• Materials knowledge: engineering plastics, elastomers and filled grades; drying requirements, moisture sensitivity, masterbatch and regrind.
• Multi-material molding — two-shot, insert molding and overmolding — as a core skill, not a side one: the machine and tool requirements of each method, material pairing and bond strength (including peel and bond testing, because a bonded part can look perfect and delaminate weeks later), differential shrinkage, cycle balancing, and the cosmetic defects specific to two-material parts.
• Tooling in detail: mold base and insert construction, steel grades, cold and hot runners, gating, cooling, venting, ejection, slides and lifters, shut-offs and surface finish; how two-shot tools fail differently from single-shot ones; and reading tool condition on the floor before it becomes a stoppage or a scrap run.
• Trials and correction: T0/T1/T2 trials, steel-safe versus steel-removal corrections, shrinkage adjustment, and knowing when a correction is worth doing — and whether to repair, refurbish or replace a tool, with the cost case.
• The arbitration. The most valuable thing you’ll do is decide whether a defect is a tool problem or a process problem, and settle it with evidence.
• Changeover or scrap reduction you can show, with numbers. We’ll ask for before and after.
• Team building across shifts, including developing setters.
• Fluent Hindi and working English.

Nice to have

• A tool room or tool design background earlier in your career.
• Scientific molding or DOE training.
• Multi-cavity and high-cavitation tooling.
• Take-out robots and automation, SMED implementation and OEE systems.
• A CIPET background.

Alongside our tooling engineer: they own mold design review and new tool development; you own tools in production — condition, maintenance, correction, and when to retire them. You’ll disagree occasionally, and that’s healthy.

In your application, tell us

Which handset programs or customers you molded for; your multi-material molding experience and the material pairs you’ve run; your average changeover time and what you did to it; your scrap rate and how it was measured; one defect where you proved it was the tool and not the process (or the reverse), and how; and the cosmetic standard you worked to.

This description summarizes the role. Duties may vary, and the final job description is confirmed at offer.

About SB eCommerce

SB eCommerce Solutions designs and manufactures personalized phone, tablet and laptop cases for brands and print-on-demand businesses. We are a team of 275+ working across 3 facilities in India, with offices, fulfillment centers and warehouses across four continents, and an ISO 9001:2015 certified quality system.