Reports to the founders.

Printing is the step that makes our product ours. It’s also where most of our quality risk sits, because a defect found at packing is a part we’ve already paid to mold.

Your scope is everything that happens to a part after it leaves the tool — every printing process we run, coating and assembly — through to a finished product ready to pack.

We have shift managers running the floor, an engineer keeping machines healthy and a specialist owning color. What we don’t have is anyone accountable for whether our decoration as a whole is good and getting better, or for deciding what we should be able to produce two years from now.

This role is technical before it is managerial. If you can’t stand at a press and tell us why the part in your hand failed, the rest of the job won’t work. And much of the time the answer isn’t the press: adhesion failures usually trace back to materials and surface preparation. We want someone who looks upstream before blaming the machine.

Who owns what

Several roles touch printing, and all of them sit under you:

You own the outcome: print and assembly quality, process capability, and what we can and can’t produce.
Operations managers own daily throughput and dispatch on their shifts.
The print engineer owns machine condition, maintenance and uptime.
The color management specialist owns profiles and color standards.

When a defect appears, the diagnosis crosses all four. You decide where it actually came from and what changes, and you’re accountable if it comes back.

What you’d build

Validated recipes for every product, material and process, so output doesn’t depend on who’s on shift.
A process capability baseline: what our defect rates actually are, by type and by process. Harder to establish than it sounds, and impossible to improve without.
A qualification route for new materials and products, so product development gets a real answer on printability and assembly rather than an opinion.
A technology strategy: which process suits which product, where current capability runs out, and what we invest in next.
A capability roadmap that lets us say yes to work we currently have to decline.

Building the team

We’re scaling, and most of our operators arrive without print-specific skills. How you build capability matters as much as how you build process.

A skill matrix per process: who can set up, who can run and who can judge quality, with certification before anyone operates unsupervised.
Cross-training as a capacity lever. In high-mix production, if only one person can set up a line, that line’s availability equals their attendance.
Limit samples, so “acceptable” is a physical object an operator can hold rather than an opinion that shifts by shift.
Train-the-trainer, so capability multiplies rather than routing through you.
A progression path that gives a good operator a reason to stay beyond the next ₹2,000 offer.
The structure of the function as we grow: shift coverage, technical specialists and quality.

What you’d own

Every printing process we run, plus coating and assembly.
Quality and first-pass yield across the whole post-molding chain — the number this role is judged on.
Capacity planning against the production plan.
Capital decisions for new capacity, and the business cases behind them.
Customer complaints through to root cause and corrective action.
The function and its team: shift operations, machine engineering and color.

What you’ll need

An engineering degree: B.E./B.Tech in Printing Technology, Polymer or Plastics Engineering, Mechanical, Chemical or Production. Printing Technology and Polymer Engineering map most closely; a CIPET background is directly relevant on the materials side.
12+ years in industrial or digital printing production, with genuine ownership of the function rather than supervision alone.
Hands-on depth across several digital and transfer printing processes on flat and three-dimensional plastic parts, and in assembling multi-part products.
Materials knowledge: how engineering plastics behave, surface energy and surface treatment, and the upstream causes of a print that fails weeks after it ships.
Coatings knowledge: coating systems and how they cure, primers and adhesion promoters, the order of print and coating, and common coating defects.
Testing: adhesion, abrasion, chemical and sweat resistance, and accelerated aging — enough to know whether a finish actually holds.
Defect diagnosis you can demonstrate, separating machine, ink, material, file, operator and environment as causes.
Color management fundamentals, fluent enough to challenge the specialist who owns them.
Quality improvement with numbers: a defect rate you reduced, and how.
Equipment selection and commissioning, with capital accountability.
Team building you can show: you’ve hired, structured and grown a production team, and built a training system that worked.
Leadership across shifts and across specialists who know their field better than you do.
Fluent Hindi and working English.

Nice to have

Injection molding exposure or coating line operation.
Decorating metal and glass.
High-mix, short-run environments.
Drinkware or promotional product decoration.

In your application, tell us

One print defect you root-caused where the obvious answer turned out to be wrong; one adhesion or coating failure you traced to a material cause; one quality metric you moved, with before-and-after numbers; one operator you developed into something more; and the processes, materials and coatings you’ve personally run.

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.

Head of Printing