Member of Technical Staff, Principal Manufacturing

About Ironstead

Ironstead Industrial Inc. acquires precision machine shops and manufacturing businesses in aerospace/defense, maritime, and commercial sectors, and rebuilds them into modern, data-driven operations. We don't run playbooks from a spreadsheet in another state. We parachute in, work shoulder to shoulder with machine operators, and rebuild the operating system of the business from the inside. IronsteadOS, our purpose-built operating platform syncing customer design to final inspection & logistics, is the backbone of that transformation, but the platform only works if someone on the ground earns the trust to implement it.

Ironstead is seeking a Member of Technical Staff, Principal Manufacturing to serve as a senior technical authority for Design for X across our manufacturing platform. Your job is to answer one of the most important questions in manufacturing before it becomes expensive:
Can we build this reliably, at the required quality, cost, lead time, and scale? You will review complex customer designs, identify manufacturing risk early, and work directly with customers, design engineers, suppliers, machinists, manufacturing engineers, and quality teams to turn product intent into a robust production strategy.

Unlike a DFM role focused narrowly on whether a feature can be machined, this role looks across the complete manufacturing system: process selection, assembly, inspection, supply chain, tooling, automation, quality, cost, and scalability. The strongest candidate will be equally comfortable challenging a tolerance on a drawing, selecting a manufacturing process, helping architect a production cell, and standing on the shop floor during a difficult first-article build.

• Architect a unified portfolio wide view of manufacturing capabilities and constraints to drive scalable industrialization.

• Translate complex product designs into robust manufacturing strategies, defining process sequences, capital equipment specs, advanced work holding, inspection plans, and production readiness roadmaps.

• Drive strategic sourcing and capital allocation decisions, evaluating internal capacity, portfolio network leverage, supplier development, automation opportunities, and Cap Ex investments.

• Lead root cause resolution for critical production failures involving process capability, tolerance accumulation, assembly, tooling, material behavior, and flow bottlenecks.

• Spearhead digital manufacturing workflows within IronsteadOS, integrating automated design reviews, algorithmic quoting, and software enabled process planning across the network.

• Author a standardized Ironstead DfX framework, codifying design rules, process selection logic, review checklists, and gate criteria into a repeatable enterprise playbook.

• Evaluate CAD models, technical drawings, and engineering specifications to drive early design alignment across manufacturability, assembly sequence, inspectability, and unit economics.

• Identify high risk design features, evaluating aspect ratios, thin-wall dynamics, tight tolerance stacks, joining constraints, and tool reach before committing to production.

• Challenge overly conservative drawing requirements, isolating functional non-negotiables from non-essential specs that drive up cost, lead time, or manufacturing yield loss.

• Drive DfX principles across multi-disciplinary manufacturing methods, including multi-axis machining, sheet metal fabrication, additive manufacturing, casting, forging, and specialized post processing.

• Bachelor’s degree in mechanical, manufacturing, aerospace, industrial engineering, or a related technical discipline

• Significant experience designing, manufacturing, or…