Mold Department Manager

Position Overview

We are seeking an experienced Mold Department Manager to lead an in-house mold building, tooling, maintenance, and repair operation supporting high-precision plastic injection molding. The ideal candidate will combine strong hands-on moldmaking knowledge with leadership experience and the ability to manage tooling projects from design and development through qualification, production, preventive maintenance, and repair.

This position operates within a highly regulated manufacturing environment where precision, repeatability, tooling quality, documentation, and timely project execution are critical.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and manage the daily activities of the Mold/Tooling Department, including mold building, modification, repair, troubleshooting, and preventive maintenance.
• Supervise, develop, and provide technical direction to mold makers, toolmakers, machinists, and other tooling personnel.
• Oversee new mold builds from concept through production readiness, ensuring tooling meets dimensional, quality, performance, and delivery requirements.
• Coordinate mold design, manufacturing, assembly, debugging, sampling, qualification, and production support.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership in troubleshooting complex injection molds and tooling issues.
• Manage mold repair and preventive maintenance programs to maximize mold reliability, uptime, and service life.
• Support high-precision molds involving tight tolerances, complex geometries, small components, inserts, and specialized molding applications.
• Oversee or support machining processes such as CNC milling, EDM, grinding, and precision toolroom operations.
• Review mold designs for manufacturability, maintainability, reliability, and production efficiency.
• Work closely with Engineering, Quality, Production, and Process/Molding teams during new product introduction and tooling development.
• Support Design for Manufacturability (DFM) activities and recommend tooling solutions that improve quality, cycle time, reliability, and manufacturability.
• Assist with mold trials, troubleshooting, process development, and the transition of new tooling into validated production.
• Establish department priorities and manage tooling schedules to meet production and customer deadlines.

The underlying manufacturing environment includes in-house medical mold building, CAD/CAM, SolidWorks, Mastercam, high-speed/hard-steel milling, CNC grinding, CNC EDM, modular mold construction, and direct-drive unscrewing technology.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience in injection mold building, moldmaking, tooling, or precision manufacturing.
• Previous leadership experience as a Mold Department Manager, Tooling Manager, Toolroom Manager, Mold Making Supervisor, Lead Mold Maker, or similar position.
• Strong knowledge of injection mold construction, maintenance, repair, modification, and troubleshooting.
• Ability to read and interpret complex mold designs, engineering drawings, GD&T, and part specifications.
• Knowledge of precision machining and toolroom equipment, including CNC machining, EDM, grinding, and related moldmaking processes.
• Experience coordinating tooling projects from design/build through sampling and production launch.
• Medical device, life sciences, or similarly regulated injection molding experience is highly desirable.

Preferred Technical Background

• Medical or precision plastic injection molding
• High-precision mold building
• Multi-cavity molds
• Insert molding
• Micro molding
• Complex mold actions and unscrewing tooling
• Modular tooling systems
• CNC machining
• CNC EDM
• Precision grinding
• CAD/CAM
• SolidWorks and/or Mastercam
• Scientific molding/process development
• Tool qualification and process validation
• ISO-regulated manufacturing environments