Senior Manager, Process Assurance; Hybrid​/Remote

Merlin (NASDAQ: MRLN) is a publicly traded aerospace and defense company building a non-human pilot to deliver full-stack autonomy for any aircraft from takeoff to touchdown. The Merlin Pilot autonomy system powers a growing range of aircraft and mission profiles and has been proven through hundreds of autonomous flights from Merlin's global flight test facilities, including Kerikeri, New Zealand;
Quonset Point, Rhode Island; and soon, Bedford, Massachusetts. Headquartered in Boston, Merlin is expanding its organization to accelerate the development and deployment of its autonomy platform, helping customers solve some of aviation's most pressing challenges, from pilot shortages to improving flight safety. Backed by some of the world's leading investors prior to its public listing, Merlin continues to advance the certification and commercialization of autonomous flight across commercial and defense aviation.

About You:

You have spent years inside engineering organizations that built certified aircraft systems, and you know that a program lives or dies on the rigor of the process behind it. You have written, audited, or defended process documentation that successfully completed regulatory System Reviews/ Process Assurance audits. You have strong leadership and communications skills and a passion for developing and leading new initiatives backed by your years of experience.

You lead by building relationships and processes, and you know how to get a team of engineers with different specialties, working in a fast-paced environment pulling in the same direction.

Merlin Labs builds autonomous aviation systems for civil and defense customers, and the engineering organization behind that work needs a leader who owns the process backbone supporting certification across multiple programs. You will lead a team of engineers responsible for configuration management, development assurance, process assurance, and software quality reporting to the VP of Airworthiness & Certification.

If you want to build the process infrastructure that enables a fast-moving company to certify complex autonomous systems repeatably instead of reinventing it every program, this is the role for you.

• Lead and grow a team of engineers spanning configuration management, development assurance, process assurance, and software quality assurance.
• Own configuration management and partner with key leaders in the engineering and flight test organization to manage the development, maintenance, and continuous improvement of these processes.
• Partner with all technical leaders to standardize and deploy core processes within engineering, ensuring they comply with established policies and guidance, and reflect best practices to support future certification.
• Establish and run a compliance auditing program verifying that engineering process documents and their execution meet established policy and guidance for military and civil certification of autonomous systems.
• Represent process assurance in interactions with certification authorities, designated engineering representatives, and customer quality, providing objective evidence of process compliance and maturity.
• Serve as the primary point of contact for DCMA and other government quality assurance representatives on military programs, providing evidence of process compliance during surveillance and audits.
• Drive continuous improvement of engineering processes based on audit findings, program lessons learned, and evolving regulatory guidance, balancing rigor with the pace a fast-growing company requires.
• Lead root-cause and corrective action analysis to close audit findings and prevent recurrence.
• Report to the VP of Airworthiness & Certification on process health, audit outcomes,…