Head of Services - Navi Mumbai (In-Office)
About Our Client
Our client is an Indian climate-tech company transforming temperature-controlled supply chains through innovative and sustainable cooling solutions.
Founded in 2013 by IIT Delhi and Harvard alumnus, they are on a mission to eliminate dependence on diesel-powered refrigeration while enabling reliable, energy-efficient transportation and storage of temperature-sensitive products.
Today, our client operates across three core business verticals: (i) temperature-controlled storage, (ii) temperature-controlled logistics, and (iii) IoT-enabled temperature monitoring - serving customers across the food, pharmaceutical, healthcare, retail, and e-commerce sectors. Leveraging its proprietary Phase Change Material (PCM) technology alongside advanced cold chain solutions, the company enables businesses to maintain precise temperature control from manufacturing and storage through to last-mile delivery.
Through its innovative Cooling-as-a-Service (CaaS) model, our client makes advanced cold chain technology accessible without significant upfront capital investment, helping customers improve operational efficiency while reducing operating costs, food waste, and carbon emissions.
Backed by leading investors, our client has built a strong business foundation and achieved profitability while continuing to scale rapidly. The company is now entering its next phase of growth, with ambitious expansion plans across products, geographies, and service capabilities.
Working at Our Client
At our client, employees are empowered with significant ownership, the freedom to innovate, and the opportunity to solve complex business challenges in a high-performance, hands-on environment. The company values curiosity, frugality, experimentation, and execution, making it an ideal workplace for professionals who thrive in entrepreneurial settings and want to build solutions with meaningful commercial and environmental impact.
The Role
As our client continues to scale nationally, the Service function is becoming a critical competitive differentiator. We are looking for a leader who can build a world-class service organisation that delivers reliability, consistency, and customer trust while supporting the company's next stage of growth.
The Head of Services will lead our client's national Service & Maintenance function, ensuring high service reliability, operational excellence, and customer satisfaction across the installed base of temperature-controlled solutions.
This role goes beyond managing field service operations. The incumbent will be responsible for building scalable service processes, strengthening service partner and vendor ecosystems, driving preventive and corrective maintenance programs, improving service responsiveness, and establishing a high-performance service organisation capable of supporting our client's next phase of growth.
The role requires a leader who combines operational discipline with entrepreneurial thinking - someone who is equally comfortable defining strategy, building systems and processes, developing service teams, and spending time in the field to solve customer problems.
IMPORTANT: The nature of this role: cold chain failures put perishable and often life-critical products at risk, so this function operates with the urgency of a hospital emergency ward rather than a standard back-office service desk. Candidates should expect calls outside working hours and on weekends when critical issues arise, and should come in with a clear-eyed understanding that this is a high-pressure, always-on role by design.
Key Responsibilities
Service Operations Leadership:
- Lead our client's end-to-end Service & Maintenance function across India.
- Own service performance from both an operational and commercial perspective, balancing customer experience, service quality, cost efficiency, scalability, and the long-term capability of our client's service organisation.
- Drive high service uptime, responsiveness, and customer satisfaction across all installed assets.
Establish scalable service processes and operating standards to support rapid business growth.
Ensure timely preventive and corrective maintenance of refrigeration and thermal energy systems.
Service Network & Partner Management:
- Build, expand, and manage a nationwide network of authorized service partners and vendors.
- Develop partner onboarding, certification, governance, and performance management frameworks.
- Drive service capability across geographies through internal teams as well as third-party partners.
- Establish strong SLAs and monitor partner performance against defined metrics.
Team Leadership:
- Lead and develop a team of highly skilled refrigeration technicians, electricians, multi-skilled field engineers, and service managers.
- Build capability through structured training, coaching, and performance management.
- Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, safety, and continuous improvement.
Customer Experience
- Act as the senior escalation point for critical customer service issues.
- Build strong relationships with key customers to ensure consistent service delivery.
- Improve first-time fix rates, turnaround times, and overall customer experience.
- Process Excellence: Design and implement standardised service processes, SOPs, preventive maintenance schedules, documentation, and audit mechanisms.
- Drive digitisation and data-driven decision-making across service operations.
- Improve spare parts planning, inventory utilisation, and service productivity.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with Operations, Projects, Manufacturing, Product Development, Procurement, and Sales to improve product reliability and serviceability.
- Provide structured feedback from the field to support continuous product improvement.
What Success Looks Like
Within the first 12 months, you should have:
- Established a scalable and standardised national Service & Maintenance framework.
- Strengthened our client's service partner ecosystem across key regions.
- Improved responsiveness, equipment uptime, and SLA adherence.
- Built robust preventive maintenance and governance mechanisms.
- Developed a high-performing field service organisation with clear accountability and performance metrics.
- Enhanced customer experience through faster issue resolution and consistent service quality.
- Created systems capable of supporting our client's aggressive business growth.
Ideal Candidate Profile
Experience:
- 8–12 years in Service Operations, After-Sales Service, Field Service, Technical Operations, or Service Delivery. This is a hands-on, technically literate leadership role, not a generalist management position.
- Experience leading geographically distributed field service organisations.
- Strong understanding of service partner, franchise, and vendor management.
- Experience in refrigeration, HVAC, industrial equipment, electrical systems, industrial machinery, cold chain, food processing, medical equipment, elevators, automation, manufacturing, telecom infrastructure, or similar service-intensive industries.
- Experience scaling service organisations during periods of rapid growth.
- Demonstrated ability to perform in high-pressure, round-the-clock service environments, including a track record of handling urgent escalations and calls outside standard working hours.
What the Right Person Is Good At:
- Translating technical and domain knowledge into managing SLAs, turnaround times, and service quality at scale.
- Building a standardised vendor and partner process where none currently exists.
- Holding a large frontline team accountable while genuinely developing them.
Culture Fit / Leadership Competencies
- Hands-on leader who enjoys solving problems on the ground.
- Comfortable working in ambiguity and building from first principles.
- Process builder rather than process follower.
- High ownership and accountability.
- Thrives in fast-growing entrepreneurial environments.
- Strong bias for execution.
- Commercial mindset.
- Data-driven decision maker.
- Comfortable working with both blue-collar technicians and senior leadership.
- Builds high-performance teams.
Why This Role
We are a performance-driven, entrepreneurial organisation that believes in giving people significant ownership from day one. Leaders at our client are expected to be hands-on, comfortable working in ambiguity, willing to experiment, and committed to building scalable systems. We value curiosity, frugality, speed, and execution over hierarchy and bureaucracy. People who thrive here are those who first understand the existing system, then improve it thoughtfully rather than changing it for the sake of change.
At our client, you'll find a wide canvas to build, experiment, and shape the future of a rapidly scaling business - not just manage an existing function.
If you're someone who enjoys building rather than inheriting, and wants the freedom to create lasting impact in a high-growth climate-tech business, we'd love to talk.
To apply, please write to [email protected]
Pay: ₹3,000,000.00 - ₹4,500,000.00 per year
Benefits:
- Flexible schedule
- Provident Fund
Ability to commute/relocate:
- Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra (Thane District): Reliably commute or planning to relocate before starting work (Required)
Application Question(s):
- What is your current annual salary? (in LPA, e.g., 45)
- How much annual salary are you expecting? (in LPA, e.g., 45)
Work Location: In person
