Sustainment Project Manager (R5302)

About the role

Founded in 2015, Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software and V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI's technology actively supports operations worldwide.

Responsibilities

• 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 actions 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.
• Pearl the coordination of configuration changes, service actions, and corrective actions 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.

Requirements

• 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.
• Proven 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.
• Experience supporting 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.
• Proven ability to prioritize 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.