Director of Operational Excellence

Do you know what a spacecraft is built of? Can you help a team of brilliant engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs make space more accessible to everyone on Earth?

We have just taken 180,000 square feet in the South Bay — today an empty logistics warehouse, in eighteen months a satellite factory running full assembly, integration, and test. As Head of Operational Excellence you will design how that factory runs before the first workstation is installed: the value streams, the capacity model, the floor layout, the operating metrics, and the business systems that hold it all together.

This is a founding role, and a hands‑on one. You will set the framework and then build it yourself — mapping a process on a whiteboard in the morning, configuring the ERP in the afternoon, writing the script that turns work‑order data into a rate dashboard. Our European operation has ten years of hard‑won practice to draw on; part of your job is deciding what to copy, what to improve, and what has to be built separately here for export‑control reasons.

You will work across Manufacturing, Engineering, Supply Chain, Quality, Construction, and Finance, and report to the COO.

• Define the value streams with our manufacturing leaders — what gets built where, in what sequence, by whom — and define value streams, plan capacity, and help optimize the cleanroom and integration flow.

• Build the capacity model: labor, equipment, floor space, and long‑lead tooling against a production plan that scales from payload integration to full AIT.

• Plan the onshoring sequence with Supply Chain and Manufacturing, from buses shipped whole out of Europe through module‑level integration to full assembly here, protecting margin at every step.

• Lead the US deployment of ERP, MES, and PLM. Configure them yourself rather than handing a requirements document to a vendor.

• Right‑size the toolchain. We want systems that fit the scale we are at and have a clear migration path to the scale we are heading for — not seven‑figure platforms that slow everyone down.

• Architect what must be segregated from our European instances for ITAR‑controlled work, and what can stay common for continuity, in partnership with compliance and legal.

• Identify the core operating processes that still live in spreadsheets, define them properly, and get them reflected in the systems of record.

• Build the operating metrics and the review cadence behind them — rate and completion, labor utilization against clocked work orders, queue time, rework by operation, on‑time delivery, cost per unit.

• Turn data into decisions. Give each manufacturing leader a view they will actually open, and run the rhythm of reviews and action planning that follows from it.

• Partner with Finance on product costing and mission profitability so that pricing, quoting, and make‑versus‑buy decisions rest on real numbers.

• Establish the improvement discipline for the site: structured problem solving, standard work, waste elimination, and the training to make it stick rather than a poster on a wall.

• Run cross‑functional process workshops — engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, quality in one room — and leave with a documented, owned, controlled process.

• Assess the capability of the operations team as it grows and close the gaps through hiring, development, and targeted training.

• 8+ years in manufacturing, with a track record of leading teams and building production lines from the ground up

• You have stood up or substantially rebuilt a manufacturing operation from scratch — a new site, a new line, or a new company

• Hands‑on ownership of ERP, MES, or PLM. Configured…