Why Join GIA? At GIA, you'll be part of the world's foremost authority in gemology, helping protect consumer confidence and advance scientific excellence across the global gem and jewelry industry. Join a mission-driven organization where integrity, innovation, and expertise come together to make a lasting impact worldwide.
Location: Carlsbad, California or New York, New York
Make a global impact. Advance scientific excellence. Help protect public trust.
Position Overview The Global Director, Diamond Identification provides enterprise leadership for GIA's global diamond identification operations and is accountable for strategy, scientific and technical capability, service delivery, financial stewardship, and organizational performance across all locations. The role converts GIA research, quality standards, and institutional priorities into a scalable global operating model that delivers accurate, consistent, timely, and sustainable laboratory services. As the senior functional leader, the Director establishes priorities, allocates resources, governs performance and risk, and holds regional and site leaders accountable for results. The role also builds the leadership and technical pipeline needed to protect public trust, advance gemological capability, and position the function for future market and operational requirements.
ESSENTIAL DUTIES & RESPONSIBILITIES
Global Strategy and Functional Governance (25%)
- Define and execute a multi-year global strategy, operating model, and annual plan for diamond identification aligned with GIA priorities and mission.
- Establish global governance, decision rights, service standards, policies, and performance expectations while enabling appropriate local execution.
- Maintain an enterprise roadmap for capability, capacity, technology, facilities, and service evolution; prioritize investments using business cases and risk analysis.
Operational and Financial Performance (25%)
- Own the global operating budget, forecasts, workforce plan, capacity strategy, and resource allocation for the function; explain variances and implement corrective action.
- Monitor a global performance framework covering quality, turnaround, productivity, cost, capacity utilization, service, and risk.
- Hold site and regional leaders accountable through structured business reviews and transparent metrics.
- Lead cross-location process standardization and continuous improvement that produces measurable gains without compromising scientific integrity or quality.
Scientific Quality and Technical Capability (20%)
- Partner with Research, Analytics, Quality, and laboratory experts to translate proprietary scientific methods into validated, scalable, and consistently executed operating practices.
- Maintain global technical standards, qualification requirements, escalation paths, and proficiency mechanisms appropriate to the complexity and risk of diamond identification services.
- Ensure significant technical, quality, and service risks are identified, escalated, investigated, and resolved with sustainable corrective and preventive actions.
Global Leadership, Talent and Culture (20%)
- Lead a geographically dispersed organization through regional and/or site leaders; set clear accountabilities, operating rhythms, and expectations for leadership behavior.
- Build succession depth for critical leadership and technical roles through talent reviews, development plans, mobility, mentoring, and targeted recruitment.
- Foster high-performing local cultures. Set global leadership expectations and support local leaders in building engaged, collaborative, accountable, and adaptable teams aligned with GIA values.
- Align organization design, roles, spans of control, and capabilities with strategy; lead change with clear communication and disciplined adoption planning.
Stakeholder Commercial and Enterprise Partnership (10%)
- Serve as the diamond identification subject-matter expert and operational partner to Business Development and Marketing. Ensure the function's capabilities, value, and service requirements are represented accurately in the market.
- Evaluate proposed services, market commitments, and growth opportunities for scientific, operational, financial, reputational, and resource feasibility before commitment.
- Represent the function with credibility in appropriate industry, client, and institutional forums, ensuring claims accurately reflect GIA standards and capabilities.
- Strengthen end-to-end stakeholder alignment, resolve competing priorities, and ensure operational readiness for launches, changes, and enterprise initiatives while serving as a trusted partner across stakeholders.
Job Competencies (Skills & Abilities)
- Accountability: Owns decisions and outcomes, defines measurable expectations, establishes governance, and holds leaders accountable for timely and sustainable performance. Acts as a guardian of GIA's mission, values, integrity, and culture.
- Strategic Thinking & Insight: Applies a global and enterprise perspective to scientific, operational, financial, talent, and market decisions. Uses industry knowledge, financial indicators, operational data, and risk analysis to advance long-term priorities.
- Innovation & Change: Creates an environment where employees and leaders challenge existing approaches, share ideas, navigate ambiguity, and pursue responsible innovation. Leads transformation through disciplined execution, stakeholder engagement, and sustained adoption.
- Decision Quality & Problem-Solving: Makes informed and ethical decisions under ambiguity. Evaluates evidence, tradeoffs, dependencies, enterprise risk, and impacts beyond the immediate function.
- Collaborative Relationships: Builds trusted internal and external networks, reconcile competing perspectives, and prioritizes enterprise needs over individual site or team interests to advance GIA's mission.
- Optimizes Talent Experience: Builds leadership and technical depth, sponsors critical talent, manages succession, and creates diverse internal and external talent pipelines and an inclusive environment where people can contribute and grow.
- Effective Communication: Communicates vision, strategy, technical information, risk, and business priorities with clarity and credibility, gains commitment across functions, locations, and seniority levels and represents GIA effectively.
- Service Mindset: Prioritizes GIA's mission and advocates for the Institute's role in serving the gem and jewelry industry.
- Ensures global operations remain responsive to internal and external customer needs while protecting integrity sustainability.
Minimum Qualifications (Knowledge & Experience)
- Bachelor's degree in geology, earth sciences, gemology, business, operations, or a related field, or an equivalent combination of education and relevant experience. Advanced degree preferred.
- Graduate Gemologist credential, FGA diploma, or a comparable recognized gemological qualification required.
- At least twelve years of progressively responsible experience in gemology, laboratory operations, scientific operations, or a closely related technical environment.
- At least seven years of people leadership experience, including demonstrated success leading leaders and geographically dispersed or comparably complex operations.
- Demonstrated accountability for a material operating budget, workforce and capacity planning, operational performance, and multi-site improvement or transformation.
- Experience converting scientific or technical standards into repeatable operating processes and measurable service outcomes.
- Demonstrated success influencing senior stakeholders and partnering across Research, Quality, Operations, Finance, HR, Technology, Business Development, Marketing, and related functions.
- Strong analytical & digital fluency, Laboratory systems, reporting tools, operational data, & Microsoft Office applications to guide.
Additional Requirements
- Regular on-site presence is required, with hybrid flexibility consistent with business and leadership needs.
- Ability to travel domestically and internationally, generally 15–25% of the time, travel during significant initiatives or operational events.
- Ability to work across global time zones and respond to material operational, quality, or stakeholder issues outside standard local hours.
- Must handle confidential scientific, employee, financial, and business information with appropriate discretion.
Work Environment / Physical Demands
- This is a production-oriented position; must be able to collect data using multiple instruments simultaneously. The employee must constantly grasp, grip and/or turn small objects (gems) with tweezers or a stone holder and concurrently view and analyze the object using a microscope, while intermittently and repetitively using a computer mouse to plot inclusions on computerized diagrams of gems.
- Must periodically adjust the microscope, requiring fine hand manipulation and eye-to-hand coordination.
- Work is performed in a designated professional office workstation and environment. Extensive use of office equipment, including computer, calculator, copier, fax, and other business-related machines and software.
- The work environment characteristics described here are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this job. The noise level in the work environment is usually moderate.
Pay Range: $150,000 – $205,000 annually
Carlsbad LabCarlsbad Lab
An Equal Opportunity Employer All employment decisions are made without regard to unlawful considerations of race, sex, religion, national origin, age, disability, or any other legally protected status. Reasonable accommodations are available upon request.
Disclaimer: This job description indicates in general terms, the type and level of work performed as well as the typical responsibilities of employees in this classification and it may be changed by management at any time. Other duties may also apply. Nothing in this job description changes the at-will employment relationship existing between the Company and its employees.
