Regional Manager

BEAR Engineering is looking for a senior engineer to lead one of its regional inspection teams. The position is intended for someone ready to move beyond a primarily inspection-focused role into one centered on leadership, training, quality control, engineering judgment, and regional performance.

Experience working at BEAR is a plus, particularly because familiarity with our field work, technical standards, report quality, and client expectations makes the transition easier. However, prior BEAR experience is not required. An experienced engineer with the right technical judgment, leadership ability, and approach can be trained in BEAR’s systems and inspection process.

The role combines engineering judgment, people management, training, client support, quality control, and responsibility for the overall performance of the region. The Regional Manager remains active enough in the field to stay close to the work, but the majority of the position is focused on making the entire regional team better and more consistent.

Regional Leadership

The Regional Manager has substantial decision-making authority within the region and is expected to operate with a high degree of autonomy. This includes judgment around inspector assignments, training needs, workload, quality, personnel development, client issues, and other day-to-day regional decisions. At the same time, this remains an accountable leadership position. The Regional Manager reports to the CEO, and the performance of the region, major decisions, and management approach are reviewed in the same way that the Regional Manager reviews the performance of the inspectors on the team. The intent is to provide meaningful autonomy without leaving someone to operate without support or oversight.

Nathan, Tiffany & Ida developed and held the first version of this role and will remain a primary resource as future Regional Managers take it over. He will be available for technical questions, unusual client situations, personnel decisions, training, and other issues that warrant another perspective. The goal is to transfer a system that has first been operated and refined directly rather than handing someone a management structure that exists only on paper. The Regional Manager will also help continue refining the systems, training methods, quality-control processes, and operating playbook used to run the region. As BEAR expands, those systems should become increasingly repeatable across additional regions.

Assistant Regional Manager

The Regional Manager works closely with an Assistant Regional Manager based overseas who handles a significant amount of the day-to-day preparation, organization, tracking, and administrative work associated with running the region. The Assistant Regional Manager assists with scheduling, calendar management, inspection assignments, vacation coordination, property preparation, tracking, and other operational tasks. The Regional Manager provides the engineering judgment, priorities, review, and direction behind those decisions while the Assistant Regional Manager helps execute them. This structure is intended to keep the Regional Manager focused primarily on engineering quality, people, training, review, and decision-making rather than spending a significant portion of the day on repetitive administrative work.

Inspection Preparation and Assignment Review

A significant part of improving inspector efficiency and consistency is having each inspection properly prepared before the inspector begins the following day. The Assistant Regional Manager will assemble the property folder and available information in advance. This includes the relevant property data, seismic information, front-of-house image, basic report information, standardized screenshots, referral information, and other readily available material used to prepare for the inspection. Before the assignment is released to the inspector, the Regional Manager reviews the preparation. The Manager goes through the property, available data, preliminary write-up, age, configuration, likely complexity, and anything unusual that may affect how the inspection should be approached.

This review is also an opportunity to confirm that the property is appropriate for the inspector receiving it based on experience, qualifications, location, and complexity. The Regional Manager then gives the inspector a concise heads-up regarding anything they should expect at the property. This should include any particular conditions worth watching for and, importantly, clarification of the points during the inspection at which the inspector should stop and contact the Regional Manager for additional input rather than making the decision entirely on their own. The referral source and agent history should also be reviewed when appropriate. If the referral source is unknown, the inspector should ask the client how they heard about BEAR so that information is captured. The overall goal is for the inspector to start each assignment with the repetitive preparation already completed, the important information reviewed, and a clear understanding of anything unusual that deserves additional attention.

Training & New Inspector Qualification

A major part of the position is training new inspectors and determining whether they are capable of meeting BEAR’s standards. Training is intended to be structured and relatively intensive rather than an indefinite period of shadowing followed by someone gradually being left on their own. During the first week, the Regional Manager works closely with the new inspector through the inspection process. This includes field procedures, floor elevation surveys, crawl-space inspections, documentation, engineering judgment, client communication, report preparation, and the overall BEAR approach to inspecting a property.

During the second week, the new inspector begins handling inspections much more independently. The Regional Manager will generally join toward the end of the inspection, independently inspect or verify the crawl-space portion where applicable, review the findings, and participate in the final debrief. This allows the new inspector to demonstrate that they can manage the inspection themselves while still providing an important quality-control checkpoint.

By the third week, the Regional Manager should have a clear sense of whether the individual is going to be successful in the position. The expectation is not that someone will know everything after three weeks, but that the underlying capability, judgment, work ethic, coachability, communication skills, and ability to follow the BEAR process should be apparent. Three weeks is generally the maximum period for making that initial determination. If someone has not demonstrated that they are likely to succeed by that point, the Regional Manager is expected to address it rather than allowing a poor fit to continue for months. One of the responsibilities of the position is making difficult personnel decisions early when necessary. Before a new inspector is fully released to operate independently, they will complete a final checkout process that includes a field evaluation, final interview or debrief, standardized questionnaire, and knowledge test. Completing the training period alone does not automatically qualify someone. The Regional Manager is responsible for determining that the person is actually ready.

The Regional Manager is also responsible for getting every new inspector through BEAR’s seismic training program. Even if the inspector is not yet preparing to take a formal external examination, they should work through the relevant book and study material, complete BEAR’s internal seismic curriculum, and take the corresponding test. The purpose is to give every inspector a stronger baseline understanding of seismic systems rather than allowing that knowledge to develop informally or unevenly over time.

Ongoing Quality Control

Training does not stop when someone is cleared for independent inspections. A core responsibility of the Regional Manager is making sure the BEAR process remains consistent throughout the region over time. At least once each month, the Regional Manager will accompany each inspector on an inspection and observe their actual field process. This is intended to verify not only the final report but how the inspection itself is being performed: property review, measurements, documentation, photographs, screenshots, crawl-space work, client communication, conclusions, and debrief. This regular field involvement is important because processes can gradually diverge even when the final reports appear similar. The Regional Manager is responsible for identifying those differences, correcting them early, and helping establish better practices across the entire team when an inspector develops an approach that works particularly well.

Report review is another significant part of quality control. The Regional Manager reviews inspectors’ work, answers technical questions, helps resolve unusual conditions, and provides feedback where conclusions, language, efficiency, or documentation can be improved. The Regional Manager will also periodically conduct knowledge checks on specific technical systems and topics. These do not need to be large formal examinations every time. They can be shorter quizzes, case reviews, discussions, or other exercises designed to determine where the team is strong and where knowledge is becoming inconsistent. These checks should be driven in part by what the Regional Manager is seeing in actual inspections and report reviews. If the team is repeatedly struggling with a particular subject, that becomes an area for additional education. Seismic evaluation is one obvious example, but the same approach can be used for drainage, retaining walls, underpinning, foundation systems, structural conditions, or other areas where additional repetition would improve judgment. The goal is that a BEAR client should receive a consistently high level of inspection quality, judgment, explanation, and reporting regardless of which engineer performs the inspection.

BEAR should operate as a learning organization rather than waiting for a formal training session to share what people are seeing in the field. The Regional Manager is responsible for driving an ongoing lessons-learned process within the regional Slack channel. On most working days, there should be something useful being shared from the field: an unusual condition, an interesting foundation system, a good example of a drainage issue, a difficult judgment call, an effective way of explaining something to a client, a mistake that can be avoided, or another observation that can help the rest of the team.

The Regional Manager should encourage inspectors to contribute regularly rather than becoming the only person producing this material. The expectation is that everyone on the team is continually looking for things worth sharing and that useful field experience is distributed across the group rather than remaining with the individual inspector who happened to see it. The Regional Manager helps curate these discussions, corrects or adds technical context where necessary, and makes sure particularly valuable lessons become part of the broader company knowledge base. This creates a much faster feedback loop. Instead of one inspector learning something and the knowledge remaining isolated, the rest of the team can benefit from it immediately. Over time, hundreds of small lessons should accumulate into significantly better collective judgment.

BEAR University & Technical Knowledge Development

The Regional Manager has ongoing responsibility for helping maintain and improve BEAR University, particularly in areas where field experience continues to produce new examples, nuances, and judgment calls. The training material should not be treated as something that is written once and then left alone. As the team encounters better examples, unusual systems, recurring mistakes, new photographs, clearer explanations, or better ways of teaching a topic, those should continually be incorporated into the curriculum. Underpinning design is an especially important example. There are many different underpinning configurations, site conditions, structural situations, and design considerations, and the subject is sufficiently nuanced that a relatively simple static training module will never capture everything the team encounters. The Regional Manager should therefore continually gather strong real-world examples and use them to expand and improve the underpinning material. The same principle applies across BEAR University. Lessons that begin as a Slack post or unusual field example can become a case study, photograph, quiz question, training video, or addition to the formal curriculum. This allows the company's collective field experience to continually improve the training received by the next generation of inspectors. The Regional Manager is therefore responsible not only for teaching from the existing BEAR University material, but also for helping make that material better over time.

Inspector Management & Development

The Regional Manager is responsible for understanding how each inspector within the region is performing and helping each person continue to improve. This includes working with the Assistant Regional Manager on weekly workloads and assignments based on experience, qualifications, location, inspection complexity, and current development needs. Performance metrics are tracked to identify where inspectors are performing well, where they may need to improve efficiency, and where additional training or resources may be appropriate. When inspection volume is lighter, the Regional Manager also helps identify useful additional work for members of the team.

The position includes regular performance discussions with each inspector, including weekly check-ins, monthly check-ins, quarterly reviews, and an annual review. These should not simply be administrative meetings. The Regional Manager should know the people on the team well enough to understand how they are doing, where they are struggling, what they want to develop, and where the company can help them improve. The Regional Manager should also use field observations, report reviews, knowledge checks, and lessons learned to create more individualized development for each inspector. Someone who is strong in client communication but weaker in seismic should receive different development