Senior Process Manager — Single-Crystal CVD Diamond Growth
Company: KK Exports
Location: Surat, India (on-site)
Job Type: Full-time, Senior level
Reports to: Senior Engineering Leadership
About the role
KK Exports is building a world-class single-crystal CVD diamond growth operation and is hiring a Senior Process Manager to own day-to-day reactor operations, material output, and process performance. This is a hands-on technical leadership role for an engineer who thrives on the shop floor, takes personal responsibility for the single-crystal diamond coming out of the reactors, and wants a meaningful R&D component in their week. You will translate growth specifications from senior engineers into stable, repeatable, high-quality single-crystal production, and dedicate roughly a quarter of your time to development work that pushes the process forward.
Responsibilities
Process ownership (≈ 75%)
- Own single-crystal CVD diamond growth recipes, reactor operation, and run-to-run consistency
- Implement specifications and growth protocols defined by senior engineers, and drive them to repeatable production
- Take personal responsibility for crystal quality, growth rate, sector control, and process performance metrics
- Lead substrate preparation, seed handling, in-run monitoring, and post-growth inspection workflows
- Coordinate with maintenance, gas handling, and metrology teams to keep reactors in spec
- Diagnose excursions and lead root-cause analysis on defects, inclusions, twinning, color, and yield loss
- Maintain rigorous process documentation, run logs, and traceability for every stone produced
- Mentor and supervise process engineers, technicians, and operators
R&D (≈ 25%)
- Design and execute development experiments: nitrogen/oxygen chemistry tuning, temperature and pressure regimes, seed selection and preparation, step-growth strategies, multi-cycle growth
- Collaborate with senior engineers on reactor design improvements and next-generation growth campaigns
- Characterize material (Raman, PL, FTIR, birefringence, UV-Vis, optical microscopy) and tie results back to process parameters
- Contribute to internal IP development and technical reporting
Required qualifications
- Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Chemical Engineering, Materials Science / Materials Engineering, or Mechanical Engineering
- Minimum experience:
- 10+ years with a Bachelor’s degree, or
- 5+ years with a Master’s or PhD
- Demonstrated hands-on experience running production or pilot-scale process equipment (plasma, vacuum, thermal, or deposition systems)
- Strong grasp of process control fundamentals: DOE, SPC, root-cause analysis, yield management
- Comfortable on the shop floor — this is not a desk role
- Strong written and spoken English; able to communicate clearly with international engineering partners
- Willingness to be on-call for critical runs and to support extended hours during development campaigns
Strongly preferred
- Direct background in single-crystal CVD diamond growth (microwave plasma CVD)
- Master’s or PhD with a thesis in diamond, wide-bandgap single-crystal materials, or plasma processing
What success looks like in this role
- Reactors run on spec, with documented recipes and predictable yields of high-quality single-crystal diamond
- Clear ownership of material performance — crystal quality is traceable and improving quarter over quarter
- Junior engineers and operators are trained, capable, and accountable
- The R&D pipeline produces real process improvements that make it into production
What we offer
- Senior technical leadership role in a fast-growing deep-hardware operation
- Direct involvement in scaling a single-crystal CVD diamond business from pilot to production
- Significant autonomy and ownership over the process
- Compensation commensurate with experience and degree level
- Collaboration with an international engineering team
How to apply
Submit your CV along with a brief technical summary (1–2 paragraphs) describing a single-crystal growth process (or comparable precision process) you owned end-to-end: what the specifications were, what went wrong at least once, and how you brought it under control. Publications, patents, or characterization data samples (suitably redacted) are welcome.
Pay: Up to ₹1,000,000.00 per month
Work Location: In person
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