Head of Supply Chain & Manufacturing

Head of Supply Chain &
Manufacturing
📆 Full time
🚀 Domain Head
🇵🇹 Porto, Portugal or 🇨🇳 Shenzhen, China
🔁 Hybrid

About Okra
At Okra Solar, we're on a mission to bring Power to the People by unlocking opportunities through energy access for everyone in the world.

Over 650 million people still live without electricity. At a time where technology such as mobile devices, productive agritech and AI are becoming more accessible than ever, we believe that access to energy is the first step toward opportunity and growth.

That's why we build our Mesh Grid technology that energizes off-grid households at a fraction of the cost of the other solutions. We provide the entire solution, including the hardware and software, that we sell to local energy companies who deploy our tech to deliver affordable, reliable electricity as a service to last-mile communities.

We've deployed 2MW+ of solar PV energizing ~50,000 people, and we're scaling fast under Nigeria's $750M World Bank-funded DARES program, with equipment for another 150,000 people in manufacturing now, and new markets opening in Mozambique and Madagascar.

The Role
As an executive leader, this role inherits full accountability for the outcomes, efficiency, growth, and risk management, of Okra's supply chain and manufacturing operations. This includes:
- Supply-demand planning & forecasting
- Manufacturing, partner production, sourcing & procurement strategy
- Global inventory, logistics, landed cost tracking
- Cross-functional leadership in on-going operations

The impact potential of this role cannot be understated; you will directly contribute towards energizing hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of people, and help steer the overall vision of the company - especially on the operational side. You will succeed our current Head of Operations and take this critical function to the next stage of scale.

This is not a line-management role;
Okra's supply chain Team Lead line-manages the team day to day. You are the senior leader who works alongside them — setting direction, raising the standard, coaching, and clearing the blockers only a senior leader can clear.

Additional role specific context:
- The BOM for a mesh-grid consists of 40+ SKUs, including: 5x Okra engineered OEM products; 4x grid metering and electricity distribution devices, 1x cellular routing device for IoT connectivity, 10x ODM-sourced products with high technical nuance, namely;
LFP batteries, solar PV, inverters, earthing systems, mounting, and cabling. 25x commodity items such as screws, cable trunking, light bulb sockets, etc.
- Sales pipelines are lumpy. Deals are large, few, and tied to customer financing timelines which sometimes slip. Forecasting must be done very carefully.
- Our BOM contains numerous long-lead time and single-source components. Some parts have lead times longer than our sales visibility. There is an ongoing need to buy up "safety stock" of various components, especially ICs.
- We usually deliver FOB China, but sometimes also CIF ->
DDP.
- We ship dangerous-goods, i.e. LFP batteries. Maintaining transport and import compliance across multiple markets is extremely challenging, as is navigating port delays and sudden policy changes.