Sustainment Project Manager (R5302)

Sustainment Project Manager

The Sustainment Project Manager is a senior individual contributor responsible for driving execution discipline across V-BAT sustainment activities. This role owns the operating rhythm, escalation mechanisms, and cross-functional execution framework required to move technical escalations, corrective actions, configuration actions, obsolescence actions, service actions, and customer-impacting sustainment priorities to closure. This role partners closely with Fleet Support, Sustainment Engineering, Product Engineering, Quality, Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Customer Success, and Operations to ensure sustainment actions are prioritized, resourced, tracked, and completed on timelines that support fleet readiness, customer commitments, and long-term product supportability.

What you'll do

• Own and maintain the V-BAT sustainment action tracker, ensuring actions, owners, due dates, blockers, decisions, and status are accurate and current.
• Drive the weekly sustainment review rhythm, including agenda management, action follow-up, decision tracking, and escalation preparation.
• Lead sustainment escalation reviews for aging, blocked, customer-impacting, or fleet-readiness-impacting issues.
• Cook up sustainment coordination across Fleet Support, Sustainment Engineering, Product Engineering, Quality, Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Customer Success, and Operations to align ownership, priority, and execution path.
• Maintain clear visibility into top customer-impacting and fleet-impacting sustainment issues.
• Drive progress on corrective actions, obsolescence actions, configuration changes, maintenance releases, service actions, and field support actions.
• Ensure major sustainment actions have assigned owners, committed dates, defined next steps, and clear closure criteria.
• Identify risks, blockers, dependencies, and resource constraints that may delay sustainment execution or impact customer support.
• Escalate blocked or aging actions with clear recommendations, decision needs, and impact statements.
• Support maintenance release coordination, release readiness reviews, and field rollout planning.
• Partner with technical teams to ensure configuration changes, service actions, and corrective actions are coordinated with appropriate stakeholders before field execution.
• Prepare leadership updates on sustainment status, priority risks, customer impacts, aging actions, and execution health.
• Translate complex technical and operational issues into clear action plans, decision points, and executive-level summaries.
• Improve sustainment operating mechanisms, trackers, review formats, escalation paths, and reporting structure as the sustainment function scales.
• Drive accountability without direct authority by aligning stakeholders around priorities, timelines, and customer or fleet impact.

Required qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in technical project management, technical program management, engineering operations, sustainment, aviation operations, manufacturing operations, product support, or complex hardware execution.
• Demonstrated experience driving cross-functional technical work across engineering, quality, manufacturing, supply chain, operations, customer support, or field support teams.
• Experience managing or coordinating corrective actions, configuration changes, obsolescence actions, service actions, production issues, field issues, or fleet-impacting sustainment actions.
• Strong technical fluency with hardware products, engineering change processes, configuration management, root cause/corrective action processes, manufacturing processes, aviation maintenance, or fielded system support.
• Pristine ability to build and manage action trackers, escalation mechanisms, risk registers, dependency maps, decision logs, and leadership reporting.
• Strong ability to identify blockers, drive accountability, escalate risks, and maintain execution cadence without direct authority over functional teams.
• Proven ability to support customer-impacting technical issues in a high-reliability hardware, aerospace, defense, robotics, aviation, manufacturing, or similarly complex operational environment.
• Strong written communication skills, including the ability to convert technical details into concise status updates, risk summaries, decision requests, and executive briefings.
• Ability to operate independently in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and impose structure where processes are immature, evolving, or cross-functionally complex.
• Strong judgment in prioritizing issues based on customer impact, fleet readiness, operational risk, technical severity, and execution urgency.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with UAS, aviation sustainment, aerospace manufacturing, defense programs, fielded hardware systems, or deployed technical products.
• Familiarity with MRB, FRACAS, RCCA, ECO/ECR processes, configuration management, fleet readiness, service bulletins, maintenance releases, or field retrofit execution.
• Experience working with deployed systems, field operations, customer support teams, military customers, or defense end users.
• Experience supporting sustainment, reliability, maintainability, or lifecycle support for complex electromechanical systems.
• Experience working in a startup, high-growth, defense technology, aerospace, or advanced manufacturing environment.
• PMP, Lean Six Sigma, APICS, aviation maintenance, engineering operations, or related certification preferred but not required.

Pay

$150,000 - $220,000 a year

Full-time regular employee offer package

• Pay within range listed + Bonus + Benefits + Equity

Temporary employee offer package

• Pay within range listed above + temporary benefits package (applicable after 60 days of employment)

Salary compensation

Is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, licenses and certifications, and specific work location.

Equal Opportunity Employer

We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know. We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.