Hardware Production Program Manager, Zeitview

• Experience: 5+ years in engineering, product development, hardware program management, or hardware manufacturing, with a strong preference for complex robotic, aerospace, or drone platforms
• Program leadership: Proven track record driving hardware programs to completion through influence rather than direct authority - coordinating technicians, engineers, and vendors toward a shared schedule
• Technical breadth: A deep understanding of electro-mechanical assemblies, aerial sensors, and payload integration, allowing you to assess field issues and dive deep into root-cause analysis when required
• Execution & agility: The ability to ruthlessly prioritize competing demands, manage tight timelines with many moving pieces, and creatively fill operational gaps
• Process-driven mindset: Proven track record of developing tools, documentation (SOPs), or processes to improve build efficiency and consistency
• Communication: Exceptional, concise communication skills with the ability to translate highly technical issues into clear updates for cross-functional stakeholders
• Ability to travel: Support a distributed engineering team and worldwide operations. Travel up to 10% of time may be required
• AI proficiency: A track record of leveraging AI to solve operational challenges, balanced with the discernment to recognize its limitations. You proactively deploy your own technical toolkit to drive results

Desirable

• We are seeking a Hardware Production Program Manager to own the end-to-end production planning, qualification, and lifecycle of our cutting-edge aerial sensors and robotic drone payloads
• In this role, you will bridge the gap between complex hardware design and flawless operational execution
• You will run the programs behind New Product Introduction (NPI), repeat production builds, and sustain engineering support for our existing fleet - driving schedules, procurement, and cross-team coordination
• If you are a natural problem solver who thrives in a fast-paced robotics environment and loves turning complex engineering prototypes into reliable, scalable products, we want to hear from you
• Production Program Management & NPI:
• Own the hardware build ecosystem: Create and manage comprehensive NPI and repeat build timelines, ensuring procurement, staffing, tooling, and documentation are set up for success
• Balance the fleet: Align closely with Operations to understand hardware demand and field repair needs. Partner with the technicians and their functional leads to sequence work across new builds, repairs, and fleet movements
• Procurement ownership: Manage procurement pipelines and BOMs, and execute procurement with vendors for a majority of sourced components
• Production leadership: Hire and develop staffing required to meet production and sustainment volumes. Develop and leverage external vendors for production when commercially reasonable
• Schedule and risk ownership: Maintain the single source of truth for build status, dependencies, and risk. Escalate early and clearly when timelines are threatened
• Sustaining Engineering & Cross-Functional Coordination:
• Technical conduit: Act as the primary technical bridge across engineering and operations teams to accelerate debugging and issue resolution
• Field support: Coordinate troubleshooting of complex issues occurring in the field; ensure clear ownership is assigned and root-cause resolutions are documented
• Process scaling: Scope and implement critical process improvements for part tracking, unit history, and issue tracking as our hardware scales
• System Performance Management: Track issues across hardware fleet under support to identify common issues and develop solutions to implement in the field to reduce excessive costs and improve system performance
• Blocker mitigation: Anticipate production or field blockers early and implement creative, agile engineering solutions to keep timelines on track