Operational Excellence Manager

Airbus U.S. Space & Defense, Inc offers advanced solutions to meet the most complex U.S. defense, security, space, and intelligence requirements. Celebrating over 50 years in the US, we remain a trusted government partner, leveraging world‑class satellite, laser communication, rotor and fixed wing solutions to help our national security, defense and space focused customers meet their missions.

Airbus U.S. looks to employ a commitment driven team, dedicated to enabling our customer's mission success. We are committed to maintaining a diverse and inclusive work environment and a welcoming and engaging staff. With competitive compensation and superior employee benefits, as well as a commitment to fostering individual career growth, Airbus U.S. is the place where top talent wants to work.

We are looking for a process minded, and data driven manager to join and lead our Operational Excellence team. You would be the key change agent to foster, promote, and deploy operational processes to ensure continuous improvement to achieve operational excellence.

You, as the Operational Excellence Manager, will be responsible for leading the team that develops, improves, and implements processes to maintain production flow while eliminating risk and implementing controls to avoid recurrences within the FL OPS organization. You would partner with functional leaders to build lean capability, streamline processes, and to lead projects and lean initiatives. You will deploy structured problem solving to improve production processes.

This manager has an eye for continuous improvement, a proven track of defining trending systems to eliminate inefficiencies and challenges the status quo while improving data integrity and product reliability.

• Responsible for the definition, implementation, and control of continuous improvement, statistical control, and tracking methods to meet on quality, on time, and on cost spacecraft deliveries.
• Works collaboratively with cross‑functional teams including with the Production and Quality teams to continually improve all processes within the Operations organization.
• Propose transverse improvement projects to the Senior Management Team (SMT).
• Present status of continuous improvement projects to SMT quarterly.
• Fosters the application of advanced engineering principles (RCCA, DOE, VSM) to solve technical (production/quality) problems on flight and non‑flight components, manufacturing processes, production flow and overall quality of the production lines.
• Take initiative to observe processes and independently develop innovative solutions to solve problems.
• Ensures to drive the execution of improvement projects with the proper stakeholders.
• Accountable to define data‑driven processes to identify root cause and implement corrective actions to prevent recurrence of anomalies ensuring that all aspects of an operation or process meet specified regulations.
• Prioritize support to the production floor in continuous improvement efforts, to drive process commissioning on new and legacy production lines, while maintaining uniformity between those product lines.
• Able to train in production processes and lean manufacturing techniques to deliver measurable results.
• Coordinate and communicate assigned projects and statuses with the appropriate personnel and departments. Establish realistic plans and set short‑term and long‑term goals. Develop contingency plans.
• Manage department budget to ensure proper improvement projects are implemented accordingly.

• BS in Industrial Engineering or equivalent technical experience.
• MSIE preferred.

• 10+ years’ experience in manufacturing environment.
• Prior small satellite manufacturing and test experience preferred.
• Prior management experience preferred.
• Strong background in aerospace industry.

• Working knowledge and hands‑on experience on definition of SPC and characterization of failures. Proven experience on data mining and deep understanding of characterization of failure modes required.
• Working knowledge in Lean Manufacturing and Root Cause…