Head - Operations - Solar Business

Role summary :

Arkahub is among the fastest-growing residential solar businesses in India. We operate across Bengaluru and Hyderabad today, growing 20-30% month-on-month, with plans to be present in 15 cities over the next 18-20 months.

• We are hiring a Head of Operations (or VP Operations, depending on seniority) to own everything that happens after the customer has paid the token amount - order management, financing handoffs, procurement and warehousing, installation, commissioning, after-sales, training, and quality. The Operations function is being built in flight: you will hire most of your own team, decide what to centralize vs. push to cities, and personally unblock the field. The City Operations Heads are P&L owners reporting to you; you set the standards they execute against and own the aggregate operational P&L.

Title and compensation will be calibrated to the person.

Key responsibilities :

• Central Operations : Order management, collections, financing partner liaison, and the central control tower. Own city expansion and capacity planning - the city-launch playbook is the single most consequential thing this function will build.
• City Operations oversight : Set the operating standards and cadence the City Operations Heads execute against. Accountable for aggregate city P&L performance, throughput, on-time commissioning, NPS, and AMC SLAs.
• Logistics, warehousing, and material control : Vendor-to-site flow for panels, inverters, MMS, BoS, and cabling. Inventory accuracy, working capital, and vendor SLAs are your numbers. Own the industrialization of the MMS pre-fabrication program.
• Installation, commissioning, and service engineering : Technical quality and safety of every installation. Crew certification standards, DISCOM-readiness, commissioning handover, and escalation resolution.
• After-installation service and AMC : Build the AMC function from near-zero. Preventive maintenance, first-time-fix, parts logistics. AMC quality is what creates referrals in residential solar; we are under-invested here today.

• Training & Quality : Build the training and certification function across the three skill tiers, including partner crews. At a 15-city expansion pace, T&Q certification throughput is a hard constraint on growth - design accordingly.
• Operations Excellence : Instrumentation, dashboards, and the continuous improvement engine. - /kW installed, TAT from token to commissioning, first-time-fix, safety, NPS.
• Designing operations for an AI-native world : This function is being built in 2026, not 2016. We expect workflows, team structures, and reporting lines designed on the assumption that AI is a teammate inside the function, not a future project. The bar is not enthusiasm - it is an operator whose answer to "how should this team be structured" is meaningfully different because of what AI can now do.
• Team building : Hire the functional leads, hire City Operations Heads as we open cities, calibrate and develop the layer below.

Required experience and skills :

Non-negotiables :

• 10-15 years of operations leadership in a multi-site, field-services or distributed-physical business. Strong-fit backgrounds: residential or C&I solar EPC, home services (white goods installation, water purification, security systems, appliance service), and home interiors execution.
• Direct accountability for leading multi-city operations.
• Demonstrated experience building an operations function from scratch or near-scratch - not just running one that someone else built.
• Comfort with both the technical and the human sides: can read a single-line diagram and can also calibrate a City Head's performance.
• Track record of hiring strong people. We will check this.
• Designs teams and workflows with AI as a default operating assumption - not as an enthusiast, but as an operator who has actually changed how a function is staffed and structured because of what AI can now do.

Strongly preferred :

• Direct rooftop solar experience, especially residential. Familiarity with DISCOM processes, net-metering, MNRE compliance, and the residential customer journey.
• Experience with installation partners and the contracting models around them (fixed retainer + day rate, exclusivity, at-cost procurement).
• Lean / Six Sigma / process excellence credentials, used in anger rather than as a wall decoration.
• Experience working with Founders directly and operating in a venture-backed environment where the strategy can change quarterly.

Reporting structure :

• Reports to: COO / Co-founder
• Direct reports: City Operations Heads (P&L owners), Head of Central Operations, Head of Training & Quality, Head of Operations Excellence
• Indirect reach: Logistics & warehouse, installation, commissioning, field service, and AMC teams in each city report into their respective City Operations Heads.

Key cross-functional partners: CFO (collections, working capital, capex on warehouses), Head of Sales (handoff at token payment, demand forecast), Head of Supply Chain / Procurement (vendor strategy, MMS program), Head of Product / Engineering