Senior Manager, Product Operations

Anduril • Costa Mesa, CA

3d • $147,000 - $196,000

About The Position

The Senior Manager of Product Operations for Frontier Systems owns product operations across the division’s product portfolio and the programs that deliver those products. The role leads multiple Product Operations managers and their teams of technical specialists and engineers, scaling operational support for products already in the field and for products that reach fielded maturity in the future. It combines operational leadership with maturation and growth of the function, requiring technical depth, strong problem-solving, and judgment about decisions affecting teams and longer-term plans.

The position is accountable for support quality for external customers and internal teams; the scaling of support coverage, infrastructure, and escalation paths; and alignment of staffing with support demand, fleet size, and product delivery schedules. It owns the workflow that turns field failures into reliable information for product and reliability engineering, and establishes standards for incident triage, diagnosis, escalation, resolution, and sustainment. The role also sponsors initiatives to mature the function, advises program teams on support requirements and associated contract and pricing structures, and briefs leadership on fleet health, reliability, sustainment cost, and service maturation.

The role may require travel up to 20% to support customer needs and operations, as well as non-standard hours when fielded operations require them.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of professional experience managing, mastering, and supporting complex technical systems in robotics, aerospace, defense, automotive, or another electromechanical domain.
• Bachelor’s degree in a technical or related field, or equivalent hands-on technical experience in military, industrial, or field support settings.
• Experience leading managers and multi-team organizations, with accountability for outcomes across more than one product line or program.
• Experience owning incident-driven workflows at a standard-setting level, including triage, diagnosis, severity assignment, escalation, and resolution across a fielded fleet.
• Technical depth sufficient to follow engineers’ and specialists’ work on fielded robotic and electromechanical systems and reason across hardware, software, and networking boundaries.
• Demonstrated familiarity with product improvement or reliability lifecycles and processes.
• Experience defining a sustainment model for fielded hardware across its service life, spanning maintenance, spares, and tooling or self-service investments that reduce support burden.
• Experience building and defending quantitative models to size support demand, headcount, or cost, including owning annual function planning and articulating model assumptions.
• Project and program management ability applied outside a project management role, including decomposing requirements into deliverables, synthesizing information into recommendations, and driving results across functions.
• Proven ability to align senior cross-functional leaders and influence outcomes without direct authority, including briefing executive stakeholders on operational performance.
• Excellent written, visual, and verbal communication skills; confidence navigating ambiguity and establishing new ways of working.
• Active U.S. Secret security clearance or eligibility to obtain and maintain one.

Nice To Haves

• Experience establishing a product support or sustainment function from the ground up, including defining its operating model, growing the team, and running remote support operations for complex robotics systems.
• Defense, law enforcement, or other government agency experience leading air defense, intelligence, and/or force protection teams.
• Consulting or process-maturation project experience, and formal training or certification in continuous improvement or project management disciplines such as Lean, Six Sigma, Kaizen, Agile, or PMP.
• Fluency with structured root-cause methods such as fault tree analysis, fishbone, or 8D problem solving.
• Working knowledge of reliability engineering fundamentals, including failure distributions, mean time between failure and maintenance, and reliability growth.
• Hands-on exposure to failure behavior of fielded robotic and sensor systems, including actuation, power systems, sensing, embedded compute, radar, RF detection, and electro-optical and infrared sensing; ability to diagnose connectivity and networking faults across distributed field systems.
• Comfort reading logs, telemetry, and test data, including hands-on use of Linux command-line interfaces and tools such as Grafana, Datadog, Jira, Git, SQL, and Palantir Foundry.
• Experience translating support scope into contract or pricing structures for operations and sustainment, and familiarity with proposal efforts.
• Fluency with sustainment data, including incident management systems, asset and configuration data, service bill of materials, and cost association.
• Experience in on-call support operations and limited-risk-tolerance environments.
• An active U.S. Secret clearance or higher, prior military service, or a defense and STEM background.
• Holding clearances or background investigations in the past.

Responsibilities

• Lead Product Operations across the Frontier Systems portfolio, managing multiple teams and growing sustainment capability and resourcing.
• Own hiring, performance management, employee development, and organizational design, while maturing the function’s operating model, standards, and capabilities.
• Ensure the quality of product support delivered to external customers and internal Anduril teams, and identify and close gaps between expected and actual practices.
• Scale support operations across current and future products and programs, establishing coverage, scope, escalation paths, and support infrastructure as products reach fielded maturity.
• Align support staffing demand with measured support volume, fielded asset population, and product delivery schedules; own annual headcount planning and produce defensible demand calculations.
• Own the workflow that converts field failures into structured information for product and reliability engineering, including failure-mode classification, corrective-action cycle performance, and recurrence measurement.
• Partner with engineering to convert individual incidents into systemic improvements, while ensuring engineering uses the signal provided and Product Operations maintains its fidelity.
• Establish and enforce standards for incident triage, diagnosis, escalation, and resolution, including severity practices that determine when issues reach engineering.
• Mature sustainment practices for complex electromechanical products, including maintenance, spares and hardware actions, configuration and calibration management, self-service, and tooling investments.
• Define and sponsor function-maturation initiatives, including their intended outcomes, success measures, and resourcing; hold program management partners accountable for delivery.
• Serve as the support-requirements point of contact for program teams assessing new and expanding programs; characterize service costs and define contract and pricing structures for proposals and modifications.
• Represent product support in recurring reviews with business-line and division leadership, covering fleet health, reliability trends, sustainment cost, and service maturation.
• Surface systemic problems with evidence, drive cross-functional prioritization, and help technical teams, program stakeholders, and field operators understand one another.
• Travel up to 20% to support customer needs and operations, and work non-standard hours when fielded operations require it.

Benefits

• Highly competitive equity grants are included in the majority of full-time offers and are considered part of total compensation.
• Top-tier benefits package for full-time employees, described as comprehensive and competitive and available at little to no cost to employees.

What This Job Offers

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