Deputy Program Manager of Operations

Job Title

Manufacturing Lead

Bachelor's degree or equivalent relevant experience, plus minimum 5 years of relevant experience; or Master's degree, plus minimum 3 years of relevant experience

Ability to obtain a Department of Defense Secret security clearance is required at time of hire. Applicants selected will be subject to a U.S. Government security investigation and must meet eligibility requirements for access to classified information. Due to the nature of work performed within our facilities, U.S. Citizenship is required.

Duties and Tasks:

• Serve as the manufacturing lead on the program, responsible for overall technical execution including cost and schedule management of the operations team, building to a customer-controlled Technical Data Package (TDP)
• Review customer contracts against the RFP/RFQ, including SOW, PWS, Terms & Conditions, and FAR/DFAR/CDRL requirements, and allocate SOW requirements and budgets to the appropriate departments
• Ensure faithful, verifiable conformance to the customer-furnished design — drawings, specifications, and TDP — as the controlling authority for all manufacturing execution
• Develop and maintain the top-level Integrated Master Schedule (IMS); track deliverables, milestones, and On-Time-Delivery (OTD) performance
• Lead program kickoff with key stakeholders, ensure Program Authorization (PA) is established and released, and set up the program document/repository structure
• Represent manufacturing operations in design and production readiness reviews and Change Control Boards (CCB); identify producibility, assembly, and test improvements and submit recommended changes (ECPs/RFDs) to the customer design authority for disposition rather than altering the baseline unilaterally
• Manage configuration control and change incorporation — flow customer-directed engineering changes, deviations, and waivers into work instructions, tooling, and the build with full traceability
• Perform make/buy analysis and oversee prototype and first-article builds, including First Article Inspection (FAI) to the customer TDP, through to production readiness
• Monitor material costs and budgets (including Design-to-Unit-Production-Cost / DTUPC) and perform Cost-to-Complete (CTC/EAC) analyses at least semi-annually
• Establish, own, and maintain the Manufacturing Risk Register, driving mitigation across cost, schedule, and technical risk
• Partner with Manufacturing Engineering to translate the customer design into robust, repeatable processes, tooling, and work instructions that maximize producibility, yield, and throughput without deviating from the controlled baseline
• Coordinate across Program Management, Engineering, Supply Chain, Quality, and Test to ensure manufacturing and contractual requirements are met on cost and schedule
• Lead and develop the operations team; define roles and responsibilities, run effective meetings, and hold the team accountable to program commitments
• Champion continuous-improvement initiatives and capture/document lessons learned for reuse across programs
• Identifies opportunities to apply AI for continuous improvement and innovation

• A Bachelor's degree in Manufacturing or Industrial Engineering, or a related Science / Engineering field, is preferred.
• Demonstrated experience in manufacturing engineering and operations, including electronics/electro-mechanical assembly, process development, and production execution in a regulated (aerospace/defense) environment
• Proven ability to execute build-to-print programs to a customer-controlled Technical Data Package, where the customer is the design authority and conformance to the baseline is paramount
• Strong working knowledge of design for manufacturability, assembly, and test (DFMAT) applied within a customer-controlled configuration — able to identify producibility and cost improvements and formally recommend them to the design authority through the change process
• Working knowledge of configuration management and change control (ECPs, deviations, waivers) and disciplined incorporation of customer-directed changes with full traceability
• F…