Senior Supplier Development and Manufacturing Readiness Engineer

Arlington, VA

Position:
Senior Supplier Development and Manufacturing Readiness Engineer

Program: Transformation, Acceleration, and Supplier Capacity Team (TASC)

Category: Funded

Location: Hybrid, (Pentagon) Government and supplier locations, as assigned

Travel: Frequent domestic travel including supplier-site deployments and Government meetings

Clearance: U.S. citizenship and the ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. Government Top Secret security clearance are required. An active Secret or Top-Secret clearance are preferred but is not required to apply. Clearance sponsorship may be available for qualified candidates, subject to contract requirements and Government authorization. Any assignments before clearance approval will be limited to authorized unclassified duties.

Position Overview

ACT1 Federal seeks a Senior Supplier Development and Manufacturing Readiness Engineer to support Department of the Navy production-acceleration initiatives across the defense industrial base, with particular emphasis on missile production and critical supplier capacity.

The engineer will conduct hands-on manufacturing assessments, identify constraints limiting conforming output, develop executable recovery plans, and support approved improvements through implementation and verification of sustained results.

We strongly encourage candidates with significant automotive supplier-development, manufacturing-engineering, program-launch, and production-ramp experience
. The successful candidate will apply disciplined automotive practices to defense production while respecting program-specific engineering, safety, qualification, configuration-control, and quality requirements.

This position requires substantial experience working inside manufacturing plants and directly improving supplier performance. Candidates must demonstrate personal responsibility for successful launches, supplier recoveries, or sustained increases in production output.

Responsibilities

Supplier Assessment and Capacity Validation

• Assess suppliers’ ability to achieve required production rates, quality, delivery, cost, and readiness objectives.
• Evaluate manufacturing processes, equipment, tooling, labor, maintenance, material flow, inspection, testing, and lower-tier dependencies.
• Distinguish theoretical, rated, available, and demonstrated capacity using traceable production evidence.
• Analyze cycle times, changeovers, equipment availability, scrap, rework, first-pass yield, work in process, process capability, and schedule adherence.
• Identify binding constraints and determine whether proposed interventions will increase usable output at the required point in the production system.
• Validate capacity assumptions through production observation, data analysis, and appropriately authorized run-at-rate or capacity-demonstration activities.

Supplier Development and Recovery

• Deploy to critical suppliers experiencing production, quality, delivery, launch, or capacity challenges.
• Develop recovery plans identifying root causes, corrective actions, responsible owners, resources, dependencies, milestones, escalation paths, and completion evidence.
• Establish daily or weekly recovery reviews with supplier, prime-contractor, and Government stakeholders, as authorized.
• Support supplier implementation of approved actions and verify their effectiveness against agreed measures.
• Identify structural issues requiring engineering decisions, capital investment, alternate sourcing, qualification, technical data, workforce development, or Government action.
• Escalate constraints that cannot be resolved through incremental process improvements.

Manufacturing Launch and Industrialization

• Assess readiness for new-product…