Field Operations Lead

About the role

The Field Operations Lead position is a player-coach role within NODA, a veteran-owned, venture-backed technology company. The role involves leading a small, rapidly scaling team of Field Operations Specialists in deploying and testing autonomous systems in various environments, including forward locations overseas. The ideal candidate will have a background in field, lab, or operational environments, with experience scaling technical teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead from the Field: Serve as a senior on-site NODA representative and customer point of contact at multi-domain field exercises and demonstrations, directing setup/teardown, troubleshooting, and execution (including at overseas locations).
• Grow the Team: Help recruit, hire, and onboard Field Operations Specialists and own the onboarding curriculum that transfers both craft and strategic context.
• Develop People and Teams: Build the training program — certification pipelines (e.g., FAA Part 107), cross-training, and knowledge transfer — and coach each team member along distinct career lanes, building depth and redundancy in critical skills as the team scales.
• Own the Safety Program: Own flight-worthiness verification, integration timelines, and test review processes that maximize learning from deliberate R&D test attrition; ensure a safe, professional shop and field environment.
• Integrate and Plan: Lead operational coordination with Mission Operations and Engineering Operations — setting tasking horizons, demo lead times, and clear points of contact — and plan and adapt complex, multi-site deployment logistics as conditions change.
• Build/Run Lean Systems: Run lean operational systems — reporting rhythms, task tracking, inventory, and delegated purchasing — right-sized so the team spends its time building and flying.
• Drive a Cycle of Improvement: Own deployment plans, checklists, logs, and after-action reports, and drive lessons learned and customer feedback into improved demo-readiness processes.

Requirements

• U.S. Citizen (required); ability to obtain and maintain a security clearance; active Secret or higher strongly preferred.
• 5+ years of hands-on technical experience in field, lab, or operational environments, including 5+ years leading technical teams.
• Demonstrated player-coach leadership: leading from the front, developing people individually, and earning trust through presence and listening rather than positional authority.
• Experience scaling or building a small technical team, ideally in a startup, R&D, or test-and-evaluation environment.
• Proven planner with experience organizing complex, rapidly changing operations or logistics efforts.
• Self-aware and adaptable; effective under rapidly changing, complex, and ambiguous conditions.
• Willing and able to deploy to forward locations overseas, including austere environments.
• Comfortable working in both lab and outdoor field environments; ability to lift 60 lbs and work in dynamic field conditions.

Qualifications

• Leadership experience, with a demonstrated servant-leadership style suited to a flat, high-trust technical team.
• FAA Part 107 Remote Pilot Certificate or ability to rapidly obtain.
• Experience with UAS/robotic platforms, payloads, RF/communications, and multi-domain test events.
• Experience establishing safety programs, test SOPs, or demo-readiness processes for hardware in the field.
• Familiarity with lightweight project and inventory tooling (e.g., Kanban boards, Confluence, asset tracking) and with right-sizing process to a small team's tempo.
• Experience in defense applications of autonomous systems (e.g., DoD programs, test ranges, military exercises), including familiarity with military CONOPS and operations in contested or GPS/comms-denied environments.