Regional Manager Job Description

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Regional Leadership

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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.

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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.

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Assistant Regional Manager

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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.

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Inspection Preparation and Assignment Review

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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.

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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.

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Training & New Inspector Qualification

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Ongoing Quality Control

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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.

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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.

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Continuous Learning & Lessons Learned

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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.

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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.

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BEAR University & Technical Knowledge Development

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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.

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Inspector Management & Development

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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 from someone who is technically strong but needs to improve report clarity or efficiency. An important part of the position is identifying and developing future leaders within the region, including someone who could eventually step into the Regional Manager position as the current Manager takes on additional responsibilities elsewhere in the company.

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Hiring & Personnel

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The Regional Manager participates directly in interviewing prospective inspectors and works with company leadership in making hiring decisions. Because the Regional Manager will ultimately be responsible for training, evaluating, and managing these engineers, their judgment is an important part of determining who joins the team. Once someone is hired, the Regional Manager owns much of the practical determination of whether that person is succeeding. This includes recognizing quickly when someone is not progressing, providing clear feedback, giving them a reasonable opportunity to demonstrate improvement, and making a decision when the evidence indicates that the role is not working. The goal is to be supportive and fair without allowing weak hiring decisions to linger. It is better for both BEAR and the employee to reach a clear conclusion early than to spend months trying to force a fit that is unlikely to work. The Regional Manager has meaningful authority in performance and personnel matters, including recommending and participating in decisions to end employment when necessary, with appropriate involvement from company leadership.

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Client & Technical Support

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The Regional Manager helps respond to questions from clients regarding completed inspections as well as inquiries about whether a particular situation falls within BEAR’s scope.  The role also includes handling some remote consultations and determining when those consultations or other client requests should be delegated to another engineer on the team. Inspectors will also communicate back to the Regional Manager after inspections when there is useful client context, an unusual issue, or a particularly positive client experience. The Manager helps determine whether follow-up is appropriate, including asking for reviews, referrals, or other forms of word-of-mouth support. Part of this process is making sure BEAR understands where its clients are coming from and which relationships are driving growth. The Regional Manager should therefore pay attention not only to the technical outcome of an inspection but also to the overall client experience and opportunities to strengthen long-term relationships.

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Project Management Support

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Some clients continue working with BEAR after an inspection and request additional help with contractor quotes, scopes of work, follow-up visits, contractor coordination, or review of completed work. The Regional Manager helps oversee these requests and determine who on the team is best positioned to assist based on experience, location, and workload. As these services continue to develop, the Regional Manager will also help establish processes for determining which types of projects BEAR should assist with, how work should be assigned, and where additional engineering involvement provides meaningful value to the client.

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Weekly Schedule and Team Coordination

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The position is deliberately structured so that the Regional Manager has enough protected time to actually manage the region rather than carrying a full inspection schedule and attempting to handle leadership responsibilities around it. The Regional Manager will perform approximately 2.5 inspections per week on average. In practice, this would typically mean two inspections one week, three the next, and similar variation throughout the year. This keeps the Manager active in the field while leaving the majority of the week available for report review, training, quality control, client support, personnel management, and regional operations.

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Wednesday afternoons are kept free of inspections.  This creates a consistent block during the middle of the week for inspectors to catch up on reports or other work, for the Regional Manager to conduct team review and training, and periodically for the group to have lunch together. This midweek block can be used flexibly depending on what the team needs. Some weeks may involve a technical review, lessons learned, a knowledge check, process training, or discussion of unusual inspections. Other weeks may simply provide time to get caught up and make sure work does not unnecessarily accumulate toward the end of the week.

The goal is to create a regular operating rhythm while retaining enough flexibility to respond to the actual needs of the team.

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Team & Regional Performance

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The Regional Manager maintains regular contact with the team through the Wednesday review period, periodic lunches, monthly happy hours, individual conversations, field involvement, and daily interaction through Slack.  The role also includes making sure inspectors have the equipment, gear, clothing, technology, data, training materials, and other resources needed to do their work effectively. If people are being slowed down by a process, missing resource, unclear standard, knowledge gap, or recurring operational problem, the Regional Manager should identify it and help fix it rather than simply working around it indefinitely.

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Regional performance and profitability are tracked as part of the role, and a portion of compensation is tied to that profitability. The position therefore carries responsibility not only for technical quality and employee development, but also for how effectively the region operates overall. The Regional Manager should understand whether inspectors are appropriately loaded, where unnecessary time is being spent, whether assignments are being made intelligently, whether clients are being well served, whether technical knowledge is improving, and whether the region is operating in a way that is sustainable and profitable.

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Field Work (2.5 Inspections / Week on Average)

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The Regional Manager remains active in the field at an average of approximately 2.5 inspections per week across the year.

This will generally alternate between approximately two inspections during one week and three during another, although the exact schedule can vary based on training, workload, vacations, inspection complexity, and the needs of the region.

The intent is to stay connected to the work, maintain technical skills, remain familiar with the houses and conditions inspectors are encountering, provide some inspection capacity, and ensure that the person responsible for training and reviewing engineers continues to practice the work personally.

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There is considerable flexibility in selecting these inspections. In general, the Regional Manager can favor inspections that are nearby, straightforward, less physically demanding, or do not require significant crawling. This is intentionally designed as a senior role with substantially less physical field work than a standard inspection position.​ Some training and monthly quality-control inspections will require the Regional Manager to enter crawl spaces. In particular, during the early training process the Manager may independently inspect the crawl space as a way of checking a newer inspector's observations. However, routine heavy crawling is not intended to be a major part of the position.

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What Success Looks Like

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The Regional Manager is successful when the region increasingly operates well without requiring constant involvement from the founders or senior leadership.​ New inspectors are trained correctly and either become productive members of the team quickly or are identified quickly when they are unlikely to succeed. Existing inspectors continue improving rather than gradually developing their own inconsistent versions of the process. Reports are reviewed and completed on time. Clients receive consistently strong service. Assignments match inspectors’ abilities. Problems are identified early. The team has the resources it needs. The region remains profitable, and people generally know what is expected of them.

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The team should also be visibly getting smarter over time. Useful field lessons are being shared almost every day. Inspectors are learning from houses they did not personally inspect. Knowledge gaps are identified and addressed rather than simply accepted. BEAR University is continually improving as new examples and better teaching material are developed. New inspectors receive a strong baseline education in areas such as seismic, and experienced inspectors continue being challenged to expand their knowledge.​ Just as importantly, the systems described above have to actually happen. Inspection preparation cannot simply be something written in a procedure. The Assistant Regional Manager needs to actually prepare the files, and the Regional Manager needs to actually review them. Monthly field quality checks need to occur. Reports need to be reviewed. Training checkpoints need to be completed. Lessons learned need to be shared. BEAR University needs to be updated. Knowledge checks need to happen. Performance conversations need to occur, and difficult personnel decisions cannot continually be deferred.​ The Regional Manager is therefore not simply someone who understands how the region should operate. They are the person responsible for making sure it actually operates that way.

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Longer-Term Opportunity

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This role is also intended to help develop the next level of leadership within BEAR. The Regional Manager will be involved in refining the systems, management structure, training process, quality-control process, technical curriculum, and operating playbook used to run the region.  The initial model is being developed directly from the way the company is being run today: leadership does the work, establishes what actually works in practice, improves it through repetition, and then turns it into a system that another capable person can own.  As BEAR expands, that experience can provide a path into larger roles involving multiple regions, company-wide operations, expansion, training, quality control, BEAR University, or other senior leadership responsibilities. The position is therefore intended not only as a management role for the current region, but also as preparation for broader responsibility as the company grows.

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Compensation & Benefits

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* Salary depending on background / experience
* Full benefits
* 4% 401(k) matching
* Annual salary increase of up to 10% based on performance
* Additional bonus compensation based on a percentage of regional profitability, with the specific structure to be defined
* Profitability-based bonus compensation begins paying after two years in the role
* Three weeks of vacation during the first year
* Four weeks of vacation beginning the following year

 

Because of the training, continuity, and leadership involved, this is intended to be a longer-term position. A minimum commitment of approximately two years is expected, with roughly three years being a reasonable timeframe for many people before potentially moving into a larger role within the company. Others may choose to remain in the position considerably longer.