Head of Qualification

Hadrian - Manufacturing the Future

Hadrian is building autonomous factories that help aerospace and defense companies manufacture rockets, satellites, jets, and ships up to 10x faster and up to 2x cheaper. By combining advanced software, robotics, and full-stack manufacturing, we are reinventing how America produces its most critical parts.

We're accelerating our mission with the launch of Factory 3 in Mesa, Arizona, a 290,000-square-foot facility creating 350 new jobs. We are expanding rapidly to support thousands of future hires, launching Hadrian Maritime to expand into naval production, and introducing a Factory-as-a-Service model that delivers complete systems instead of individual parts.

Hadrian is backed by leading investors including T. Rowe Price, Lux Capital, Founders Fund, and Andreessen Horowitz, our fast-growing team is united around reindustrializing American manufacturing for the 21st century and beyond.

Hadrian is seeking a Head of Qualification to own and scale how parts get qualified for production across our defense programs. This is the leader who turns incomplete, legacy technical data into production-ready manufacturing data and source-approved parts, at speed and at scale.

Qualification is its own discipline at Hadrian: the end-to-end pipeline that takes a part from intake through technical data evaluation, gap resolution, qualification data package assembly, first article verification, and part qualification to source approval. The Director of Qualification owns that pipeline — the process, the tooling that runs it, the team of Product Qualification Managers (PQMs) and engineers who do the substantive technical work, and the customer-facing relationships that move parts through approval.

This person will define what qualification means at Hadrian, hold a clear line on what is and isn't in scope, and build a function that gives our customers full visibility into where every part is and what's blocking it, while keeping qualification throughput and confidence in the data extremely high.

• Own Hadrian's end-to-end qualification function — from part intake through technical data evaluation, gap resolution, qualification data package assembly, first article verification, and source approval — in alignment with customer requirements
• Define and maintain qualification scope, and own the qualification pipeline and its workflow automation
• Lead the technical core: direct Product Qualification Managers (PQMs) and Manufacturing/Quality Engineers performing technical data evaluation and qualification data package generation, producing production-ready design data sets and TDPs
• Own qualification performance and reporting — tracking metrics such as time-to-qualification, parts in pipeline, parts qualified, and parts overseen per PQM — and serve as Hadrian's qualification interface to the customer, running part prioritization jointly
• Partner closely with reverse engineering, manufacturing engineering, and quality to ensure qualification outputs translate into producible, source-approved parts, while hiring, developing, and scaling a high-performing qualification organization

• Bachelor's degree in Mechanical or Manufacturing Engineering or a related technical field, and 8+ years of experience in qualification, quality, manufacturing engineering, or related leadership roles
• Detailed knowledge of part/product qualification, first article verification, technical data packages (TDPs), and source approval; aviation component qualification is a plus
• Demonstrated ability to interpret and apply complex regulatory and customer requirements based on intent and risk, and to translate them into clear, practical workflows
• Demonstrated ability to build, scale, or significantly improve systems, processes, or organizations in complex, ambiguous environments, including leading and developing high-performing teams
• Strong decision-making in ambiguous, high-risk, customer-facing situations, with excellent communication and cross-functional leadership across engineering, operations, and government customers

• Direct experience with DoW qualification,…