The posting
Lotus Group is proud to partner with an Edmonton-based technology company that designs and builds precision light solutions for a global customer base, including Fortune 100 companies, national laboratories and space agencies, and leading aerospace and energy companies. As the company enters the next stage of its growth, they are searching for an accomplished Chief Operating Officer to lead the operational execution of the organization. With the founders away from day-to-day operational leadership, creating an opportunity for an experienced operational executive to take ownership of the company's operating system, financial discipline, leadership accountability, and execution.
Reporting to the Founder/CEO, the Chief Operating Officer will serve as the company's Integrator, translating strategy into disciplined execution across the organization. This individual will bring structure, accountability, and operational clarity to a growing technology business while ensuring the organization can scale effectively without sacrificing quality, culture, or customer experience.
Role Responsibilities
Operational Leadership & Organizational Integration
- Take ownership of the day-to-day operational leadership of the organization, ensuring priorities are clearly defined and consistently executed.
- Translate the company's strategic vision into quarterly priorities, measurable commitments, and clear accountability across the leadership team.
- Establish and maintain a disciplined operating rhythm across the organization, including weekly leadership meetings, quarterly and annual planning, scorecards, issue resolution, and cross-functional coordination.
- Ensure departments are aligned and working toward common organizational priorities.
- Identify and resolve recurring operational issues, organizational bottlenecks, and cross-functional challenges.
- Drive consistent execution while ensuring the organization remains agile as it continues to grow.
Financial Performance & Business Management
- Own the financial performance of the organization, including revenue, profitability, realized contribution margin, budget performance, and forecasting.
- Partner closely with the finance function to strengthen budgeting, monthly close, forecasting, financial reporting, and margin visibility.
- Use financial and operational data to drive decision-making and ensure leaders understand the financial impact of their decisions.
- Establish greater financial discipline and accountability across departments.
- Support the organization in progressing toward its EBITDA and long-term profitability objectives.
- Own the People & HR function
- Ensure the finance and accounting function develops the ERP, IT systems, processes and capabilities required to support a growing organization.
Manufacturing, Supply Chain & Operational Scalability
- Provide operational leadership across manufacturing, hardware, engineering-led production, and supply chain environment.
- Advance the company's outsourced manufacturing strategy while maintaining appropriate oversight of quality, cost, timelines, and supplier performance.
- Improve supply chain resilience and establish stronger operational processes that support future growth.
- Ensure manufacturing and operational systems can scale as the organization increases revenue and expands its customer base.
- Build repeatable, documented processes that reduce organizational dependency on individual leaders and founders.
Customer, Vendor & Strategic Relationships
- Support strong relationships with key customers, vendors, and strategic partners.
- Ensure effective coordination between customer-facing, operational, technical, and supply chain teams to ensure that customer commitments are consistently met.
- Address significant customer or vendor issues and ensure appropriate escalation and resolution.
- Support important external relationships including customers, vendors, banking, investment, grant, board, and other strategic partnerships as required.
Leadership & Team Development
- Lead and develop a capable, accountable, and high-performing leadership team.
- Establish clear expectations and ensure leaders are accountable for delivering results within their respective functions.
- Coach leaders, resolve conflict, and create alignment around organizational priorities.
- Build a culture of ownership, transparency, collaboration, and follow-through.
- Create an environment where leaders are empowered to lead their teams while remaining accountable to the broader organization.
- Partner effectively with the Founder/CEO, providing the operational leadership necessary to allow them to focus on strategy, growth, and other organizational priorities.
Strategic Execution & Growth
- Partner with the Founder/CEO to translate the organization's long-term vision into practical operating plans.
- Provide the operational discipline required to support growth from approximately $8 million in revenue toward its next goal of over $20 million.
- Evaluate organizational capacity, resources, systems, and processes to ensure the business is prepared to scale.
- Help the organization navigate the operational complexity and uncertainty associated with rapid growth.
- Balance immediate business priorities with the development of scalable systems and infrastructure.
- Ensure strategic initiatives are appropriately prioritized, resourced, and executed.
Qualifications & Experience
- Significant senior operational leadership experience with responsibility for the day-to-day operations of an organization or business unit.
- Previous experience in a role such as Chief Operating Officer, General Manager, Operating President, VP Operations, or comparable senior operational leadership position.
- Demonstrated experience owning a P&L and making operational decisions based on financial performance and business metrics.
- Strong understanding of budgeting, forecasting, margin management, and financial accountability.
- Experience working within a manufacturing, hardware, engineering, technology, or similarly complex operational environment.
- Demonstrated success building structure, accountability, and scalable processes within a growing organization.
- Experience leading senior leaders and creating alignment across multiple functional areas.
- Strong executive presence with the ability to work effectively with founders, executives, employees, customers, and external stakeholders.
- Proven ability to lead through periods of organizational growth, change, and transformation.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience scaling an organization through a comparable stage of growth.
- Experience within a deep-tech, hardware, manufacturing, engineering, or science-led organization where value created is driven by new product introduction.
- Familiarity with outsourced manufacturing and supply chain management.
- Experience with a global customer base, including regulated and security sensitive sectors such as aerospace and energy
- Experience implementing or operating within EOS or a similar business operating system.
- Familiarity with EOS tools including Rocks, Scorecards, Level 10 Meetings, IDS, and Accountability Charts.
- Experience working within a founder-led organization and successfully transitioning operational accountability away from the founders.
Cultural Fit
The ideal candidate will:
Lead with candor and integrity: make hard calls, tell uncomfortable truths, own mistakes and hold themselves and others accountable rather than letting things slide
- Lead with humility: with confidence that doesn't depend on being right, and willingness to offer and receive tough feedback because team performance matters more than any one ego.
- Bring structure and discipline while remaining comfortable operating within a growing and evolving organization.
- Build alignment and forward momentum without requiring complete consensus.
- Be comfortable challenging assumptions and engaging in constructive discussions with founders and senior leaders.
- Identify organizational overload, competing priorities, and accountability gaps and take action to resolve them.
- Combine strong operational instincts with sound financial judgment and commercial awareness.
- Be comfortable making decisions, establishing priorities, and holding the organization accountable for execution.
- Follow through on commitments and expect the same from others, seeking feedback from the team and customers so that the organization doesn't solve the same problem twice
Measures of Success
Success within the first 12–18 months will include:
- A clearly functioning leadership team with well-defined accountability across the organization.
- Consistent execution of the company's operating system, including quarterly priorities, leadership meetings, scorecards, and planning processes.
- A stronger finance and accounting function with improved budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and financial visibility.
- Achieved target performance against revenue, contribution margin, budget, and EBITDA objectives.
- Fewer recurring cross-functional operational issues and greater accountability for issue resolution.
- Meaningful progress toward a scalable manufacturing and supply chain model, including QMS and ISO9001.
- Improved documentation, process consistency, quality controls, and operational follow-through.
- A successful transition of day-to-day operational leadership from the founders to the COO, allowing the founders to focus more heavily on growth and strategic opportunities.
Compensation
A comprehensive compensation package including competitive base salary, benefits, incentive opportunities, and additional perks will be provided based on experience and qualifications.
We thank all interested applicants. Please note that only those applicants who meet the qualifications and requirements will be contacted.
Lotus Group provides Elevated Search, Recruitment and Human Resource services across Canada. With established client and talent networks spanning coast to coast, we know that employees are the power that fuel excellent organizations. Lotus Group is dedicated to being Canada's most trusted provider of Elevated People Solutions.
For more information, visit www.lotus-group.ca
