We’re proud to announce the grand opening of our new manufacturing facility in San Francisco. The new facility is capable of producing several thousand sensors per month, ensuring that we keep pace with strong market demand. As we perfect every step of our design and manufacturing processes, the tight feedback loop between engineering and manufacturing teams continues to be an advantage for Ouster.
The new facility houses state-of-the-art manufacturing capabilities and will handle all production of our most recent lidar models. The space features a 6,000 sqft clean environment – filtered, air-controlled environment – to ensure particles don’t contaminate the sensors, and ESD flooring to dissipate static discharge and avoid any shocks that could damage electronics.
Our production process leverages cutting edge automated assembly, calibration, and test tooling to ensure the highest degree of repeatability, reliability, and quality across all of our products. While the product itself contains boundary pushing technology – Ouster’s advantage lies equally with our focus on the machines that build the machine and it’s one of the reasons this facility is so productive on a square footage basis.
Built in the Mission
Ouster started as four engineers in a garage in San Francisco’s Bayview district, building and testing prototype sensors by hand. 3 years later, we have over 100 employees in a 46,000 sqft space building hundreds of sensors every month.
High tech manufacturing is rare to see in San Francisco, but our decision to keep production local has proven invaluable to our rapid success. Having design engineering, manufacturing engineering, manufacturing ops, and the manufacturing floor literally under one roof has allowed us to move far more quickly into production and creates a higher quality product overall. It’s also an inspiration to our team to see sensors shipped out the front door everyday.
The People Who Make it Possible
Manufacturing Operations at Ouster is currently a team of 50 diverse experts from around the world.
“We have a team of very smart people that are happy to learn this new market, and are willing to do what it takes because of the passion they have for the product and the company,” says Darien Spencer, VP of Operations at Ouster.
“It’s fulfilling to be at the beginning of an exciting industry. For some, this is the fourth new industry they’ve worked in, and for others it’s the first, but all are very dedicated to winning. It’s rewarding to make significant progress, work through challenges together, and set the foundation for a brand new market.”
By the end of 2019, we plan to grow to 100 manufacturing and operations employees – so if you’re interested in joining the team, please have a look at our job postings.
