Operations Lead

Operations Lead - Supply Chain & Business Ops1AM · Gurgaon, on-siteIf you've ever taken it personally that a consignment got rejected on a date mismatch, we're going to get along.Most people meet a brand at the shelf. This job lives in the weeks before that. Get it right and everything downstream looks effortless. Get it wrong and the best sales team in the country has nothing to sell. Right now most of it sits with me, and it shouldn't.1AM is cold coffee in a can. 100% Arabica, zero added sugar, and a lactose free range nobody else in India is making. Nine months at ambient, no cold chain, which is exactly why we can go where chilled brands can't. We manufacture through a contract plant, with an R&D team alongside us during production.You'd own everything between deciding we're producing and the stock existing.Material planning, and the negotiating that comes with it - the best rate genuinely available, and the right quantity at the right time against lead times that are real rather than assumed. Dates confirmed on mail with the plant and with R&D, not agreed on a call and then quietly moved. Everything ready before a run, never during. Landed cost reworked after each run, because a stale number means we're quoting distributors something that isn't true. And when something breaks mid-process, you hold it until it's closed.The stock is yours as well. FIFO, no exceptions. Batch and expiry known on every lot, so nothing goes out anywhere near a date cutoff. Reorder points that get production planned ahead against what the plant can take and what material we can actually get, instead of us discovering we're empty.Quick commerce sits here too. An agency runs growth, you run the operations beneath it - POs against stock we actually hold, dispatches ready before anyone chases, GRNs, fill rates, rejections diagnosed so they don't repeat, claims closed with the credit note in hand. On the weeks I'm travelling, it runs without me.And the documents, which I care about more than most people expect. Sales data, material data, closing stock from the plant, reconciled monthly against our books and a physical count. One calendar for everything that expires, ours and every vendor's, renewed before it lapses rather than after someone notices. If a distributor asks for a licence copy at nine at night, it exists and it goes out.Five to nine years in operations, supply chain or procurement, and food or beverage is the shortest way in. If you're short of that but you're certain you can do this, and you want to grow inside a fast-moving startup rather than watch one from the outside, tell me in the mail what makes your profile different and we'll have that conversation.Straight about the shape of it. There's no ops team under you and won't be for a while. You'll call the vendors, stand at the plant during a run and build the trackers yourself. What you get for that is the operating spine of this company built by you rather than inherited from someone else. If your last decade has been about getting work done through other people, skip this one.Gurgaon, on-site, with travel to the plant in Rajasthan and to vendors when it's needed. You'd report to me.ari@at1am.com. Before the CV, in the body of the mail, tell me about one vendor negotiation you won and what the lever actually was. Those get read first.