Deployment Operations Manager

VDS Consulting Group•Costa Mesa, CA

3d•$112,000 - $149,000

About The Position

VDS is recruiting for a Product Operations Manager to keep fleets of autonomous underwater, maritime, and other fielded defense systems ready and available for missions across several product lines. The role spans autonomy software, networking, and hardware integration, and leads the response when deployed systems fail. The manager turns field failures and fleet-health data into root-cause findings and engineering fixes, while connecting engineering, business development, and naval end users. The role requires travel, including field travel to customer sites for hands-on support when needed, and eligibility for a U.S. Secret clearance.

Requirements

At least 6 years supporting complex technical systems, including team leadership, or at least 6 years in technical operations, reliability, or field support.
A technical bachelor's degree or equivalent military, maritime, or industrial experience; a bachelor's degree is also specified for the related role.
Must be eligible for a U.S. Secret clearance.
Comfort using logs, dashboards, and support tickets to determine root causes.
Ability to diagnose root causes using logs and the Linux command line.
Independence in addressing hardware, software, and networking problems.
Willingness to travel, including field travel.

Nice To Haves

Unmanned underwater vehicle or munitions deployment experience, or a naval background.
Linux, Grafana, Jira, Git, and SQL or Palantir Foundry experience.
Active U.S. Secret clearance.
A STEM degree or MBA.
Defense, special operations, or military experience.
On-call or site-reliability background, data analysis, Grafana, and Git experience.

Responsibilities

Lead the incident-response team for deployed maritime systems and lead customer-facing incident response.
Translate field failures and root-cause findings into clear design-change requests and fixes for engineering.
Use fleet-health data to identify failure trends and spot issues before they happen.
Serve as the link between engineering, business development, and naval end users.
Standardize sustainment and support processes across the fleet.
Improve system monitoring and health data.
Travel to customer sites when issues require hands-on work.