Chief of Staff

Sitreps • Portland, OR

1d • Onsite

About The Position

Our engineering capacity has grown faster than the layer that manages it. We can staff more programs than we can currently plan, sequence, and steer. The Chief of Staff is the hire that closes that gap. You would report directly to one of the partners, a former military aviator who runs the programs side of the business. The role is a genuine hybrid: program management, client and account management, some business development, and internal operations. In a firm this size that is not a compromise, it is the job. You are the person who takes a program from a well-planned proposal through the six months of reality that follow it, and keeps the plan, the engineering team, and the client all pointed the same direction.

Requirements

• Roughly four to eight years of professional experience. This is not a senior hire and it is not an entry-level one.
• A quantitative background. An engineering undergraduate degree is a plus. So is any graduate work where you were expected to do real analysis and make defensible trades between options with cost consequences.
• Enough technical grounding that an undergraduate physics level conversation is comfortable. If an engineer tells you a change is not feasible because of the torsion on the wing, you should not be looking up the word torsion.
• Ownership. You move fast, you work independently, and you know the difference between a question worth asking and one you should go answer yourself.
• The ability to talk to a business leader like a peer. Our partners advise clients on product development and business strategy, so you will be in front of senior people early.
• Strong written and verbal communication. Much of this job is making a case to someone who was not in the room.
• You will not be doing design work.
• We are not looking for a practicing engineer, and we are not looking for a career project manager with a PMP and no appetite for ambiguity.
• We are looking for someone hungry and effective who wants a large scope early.

Nice To Haves

• A junior military officer coming out of an MBA program who wants an operating role rather than a traditional post-MBA path.
• A junior military officer with a business or engineering undergraduate degree going straight into industry.
• Someone one to two years into a large company, in strategy, operations, or program management, who has concluded that the scope there is too narrow and the pace too slow.

Responsibilities

• Run development programs end to end. You partner with a Chief Engineer on each program and own the plan, the schedule, the budget, and the client relationship around it.
• Steer programs when the plan changes, because it will. Proposals are built on a clean set of assumptions. Two weeks in, the context shifts. Your job is to make the trade deliberately rather than letting it happen by drift.
• Manage clients and their expectations. When a program needs more attention or schedule relief, you make the case and frame it in terms of what actually serves the client's aircraft.
• Put informed pressure on the engineering side. Not to move faster for its own sake, but to make sure work is scoped and sequenced well.
• Pull the numbers and make the call. Get into our program database, pull actuals on aerodynamics hours or mechanical engineering hours from a prior program, compare them against where a current program sits, and come back with a recommendation. The deliverable is the recommendation, not the pivot table.
• Support capture and proposal work as you build context, and take more of it over time.
• Improve the operating system underneath all of the above. The cadence, the templates, and the SOPs that let the next program manager ramp faster than you did.

Benefits

• $140,000 to $160,000 base, depending on experience, plus a 25% target bonus
• Relocation is strongly preferred. For the right person we can make an arrangement work where you are on site roughly two weeks out of every month.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level