Staff Technical Program Manager, Production

ABOUT THE TEAM

The Air Dominance and Strike Division is one of Anduril's fastest growing, most technically complex divisions. We develop and build collaborative combat aircraft, missiles, and the software that powers these autonomous weapons. We are scaling production of a first-of-kind autonomous aircraft at Arsenal 1 in Ohio at a pace the defense industry has never attempted.

ABOUT THE JOB

There is no inherited system. You define how schedule, cost, and supply chain risk are tracked, acted on, and reported for a first-of-kind weapons system. When production stalls, you diagnose why, build the right people into the room, and drive the resolution. You do not run production operations. You own whether production delivers on cost, on schedule, and on trajectory.

Success in this position hinges on three key facets:

• Technical depth and financial rigor - you understand the engineering well enough to challenge assumptions, and you own cost and schedule performance with the precision to know when something is off before it compounds.
• Execution at velocity - decisions happen in hours, not weeks. You drive resolution, not meetings. When the program is healthy, you are why. When it is not, you are the first one diagnosing it.
• Credibility-driven leadership - you earn trust across engineering, supply chain, and production leadership through being rigorous, fast, and right. Title gets you nothing here.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Build the program architecture that takes a first-of-kind autonomous aircraft from early production to rate, including schedule, cost, and supply chain risk systems
• Own financial performance and program-level outcomes alongside production leadership, accountable to unit cost variance, schedule predictability, and margin
• Drive prioritization decisions when resource conflicts cross functional boundaries between engineering, supply chain, and production
• Own the integrated master schedule for production and connecting threads
• Build and maintain cost traceability connecting production floor operations to unit cost to program-level financial KPIs
• Drive supply chain risk identification and mitigation with schedule and cost data, owning time-to-resolution on disruptions
• Serve as primary program interface to the customer for production status, schedule narrative, and program health
• Define which metrics drive decisions versus which report status, building leading indicator systems that enable early intervention
• Leverage quantitative models (trade studies, sensitivity analysis, predictive modeling) to inform program decisions and resource allocation
• Prepare technical documentation, analysis reports, and briefings for internal teams, customers, and government stakeholders

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 6-8+ years managing complex technical hardware programs through development and production lifecycle
• Demonstrated ownership of schedule and cost performance on programs with aggressive timelines and rapid scale
• Technical depth in hardware systems sufficient to challenge engineering assumptions and assess production risk
• Experience building program management systems from scratch in environments without established playbooks
• Proven ability to drive cross-functional decisions without direct authority across engineering, supply chain, and production
• Comfortable building or interpreting quantitative models to inform program decisions
• Familiar with version control, scripting, scalable workflows, and reproducible analysis practices
• Eligible to obtain and maintain an active U.S. Secret security clearance

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Lean Six Sigma certification or equivalent demonstrated application of structured problem solving and process improvement methodologies in production environments
• Experience in aerospace, defense, or autonomous systems production environments
• Proficiency with data tools such as Palantir Foundry, discrete event simulation, or custom analytics stacks
• Background in trade studies, causal modeling, or sensitivity analysis applied to production decisions
• Experience interfacing with government customers (DCMA, USAF) on program status and delivery
• Experience scaling production operations from prototype to rate in a high-complexity manufacturing environment