Production Supervisor
LettrLabs · Los Angeles, California, United States
About the job
The Role
LettrLabs is disrupting a $30B industry by uniting AI with tangible marketing. When a storm hits, our platform geo-locates to zip code, activates direct mail campaigns in minutes, and tracks every conversion back to digital, driving 5x return on conversions and 3x year-on-year growth for our customers.
LettrLabs produces handwritten and printed direct mail at scale. As a Production Supervisor in Los Angeles, you will own a shift end to end: the people on it, the schedule it has to achieve, and the machines that have to stay running to achieve it. This is a floor job, not a desk job. You will spend your day at the machines, coaching operators, clearing constraints, and putting your hands on equipment when it goes down.
You will also be the connecting point between the floor, our Head of Production in Chicago, and our engineering team in Los Angeles. You will report production performance and risks to the Head of Production every day, bring engineering clear, detailed fault information so recurring problems get fixed at the root, and carry changes and standards back to the floor. We are looking for a supervisor who treats machine uptime as their own responsibility. Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is not a program we ask you to support. It is how the shift is expected to run, and you will lead it at the machine.
Why Join Us
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Own a shift end to end at the heart of a fast-growing direct mail manufacturer, where your work is visible in every customer mailing.
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Work with custom-built and modified equipment alongside in-house engineers and technicians who build and improve it.
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Report to the Head of Production and partner with engineering, with real influence on the standard for production performance, processes, and culture as we scale.
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Lead with TPM: autonomous maintenance, root cause, and OEE are how we run, not a side project.
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Competitive compensation with meaningful equity upside.
What You Will Own
Lead the Shift
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People and coverage: Staff the shift to the day's plan and balance operators across print, plotting, inserting, and finishing as the workload moves. Create and maintain the shift schedule, monitor attendance, and flag coverage gaps early.
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Daily direction: Run a short start-of-shift huddle covering yesterday's result, today's plan, what is past due, and which machines are down. Run routine floor check-ins to find bottlenecks early.
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Capability and training: Build and maintain a cross-training matrix so no station depends on one person. Coordinate and oversee employee training on SOPs, safety, and responsibilities, and close training gaps.
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Performance: Set clear standards, give feedback in the moment, run performance conversations, and handle attendance and conduct issues early and fairly.
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Safety: Own safety on your shift, including hazard walks, near-miss reporting, lockout/tagout discipline, and making it normal for anyone to stop a machine they are not comfortable with.
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Handover: Deliver a clean written handover to the next shift covering what ran, what did not, and what comes next.
Hit the Daily Plan
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Schedule execution: Translate the production schedule into a station-by-station plan and re-sequence when a machine goes down or a job jumps the queue. Manage the priority lane so urgent work stays visible.
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Priorities: Protect on-time delivery by working past-due and at-risk jobs first, and escalate early when the day cannot be recovered.
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Capacity: Understand what each plotter type can actually produce in a shift, and flag when committed volume exceeds the machines and people available.
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Flow: Keep work moving between steps so jobs do not pile up ahead of the plotting or envelope stations.
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Coordination: Align daily and upcoming plans with the Assistant Operations Managers and leadership, and communicate anticipated workload, staffing needs, and risks.
Keep the Equipment Running: Hands-On TPM
This is the part of the role we will screen hardest on.
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Autonomous maintenance: Train and hold operators to daily clean, inspect, and setup, with standards posted at the point of use.
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Planned maintenance: Make sure scheduled PMs happen on time, not when the machine finally breaks. Track adherence and protect the window, and schedule service appointments and third-party vendors when needed.
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Breakdown response: Follow the escalation protocol for timely intervention, troubleshoot hands-on, and know when to bring in a technician, engineering, or an outside provider.
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Downtime discipline: Log every stoppage with cause and duration, then use the data to find the machines and failure modes that cost the most time.
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Root cause: Lead structured problem solving (5 Why, fishbone) on repeat failures and drive countermeasures to closure so the same fault does not come back next month.
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OEE and reliability: Track availability, performance, and quality by machine type, and use it to argue for spares, rebuilds, or replacement.
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Spares and records: Keep critical spares and consumables stocked and the maintenance log current in the CMMS.
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Workplace organization: 5S at every station, shadow boards, visual standards, and equipment clean enough that a leak or a loose part is obvious.
Partner with the Head of Production and Engineering
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Give the Head of Production in Chicago clear, regular updates on shift performance, past-due volume, downtime, quality, safety, and risks, and flag problems early rather than after the miss.
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Take direction on priorities, KPIs, and standards from the Head of Production and carry them to the floor consistently across shifts.
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Work closely and frequently with the LA engineering team on equipment faults, modifications, and improvements. Give engineering detailed, reproducible fault information, and make sure every modification is followed by updated standard work and operator training.
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Bring floor feedback to engineering and leadership so improvements are built around how the machines are really run.
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Keep written escalations, handovers, and corrective actions clear enough that someone in another city or on another team can act on them.
Protect Quality and Yield
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Scrap: Own scrap on your shift. Know which step generates it, not just the total, and close the causes.
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Verification: Run first-piece approval and in-process checks so a mis-set machine is caught in the first hundred pieces, not the first ten thousand.
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Standards: Hold standards for handwriting quality, print registration, insertion accuracy, and address legibility on plotted envelopes.
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Corrective action: Investigate defects that reach the customer and close corrective actions properly.
Inventory, Supplies, and Facility
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Conduct daily inventory counts, keep records accurate, and flag potential shortages before they affect the plan.
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Oversee the receiving and verification of deliveries and keep supplies, sample packs, and trade show materials organized and available.
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Maintain oversight of required counts, logs, and tracking documents, including Pitney Bowes mail slips.
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Take ownership of day-to-day upkeep of the floor, run walkthroughs, and coordinate facility repairs and recurring services with the maintenance technician.
Improve the Line
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Continuous improvement: Run kaizen with the operators who do the work, not to them.
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Standard work: Write and maintain standard work so the job runs the same way on every shift.
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Visual management: Build boards that make the shift's status obvious from ten feet away: plan versus actual, machine status, and quality holds.
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Use Claude and other AI tools to work faster on shift data, downtime patterns, SOP updates, and reporting.
What You Bring
Manufacturing environment
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Three or more years supervising production in a manufacturing, print, packaging, or fulfillment operation, with real accountability for output, quality, and cost.
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You read a production plan, understand ta