Senior Product Operations Manager

Anduril • Costa Mesa, CA

2d

About The Position

The Senior Product Operations Manager for Maritime and Maneuver Dominance (M&MD) owns product operations across the division’s product portfolios and the programs that deliver them. The role leads multiple Product Operations managers and engineers responsible for supporting and improving fielded products and partnering with product engineering on sustainment- and customer-experience-focused features informed by Voice of the Customer (VOC) insights.

The position builds and operates a product support function that can scale as the division’s portfolio grows. It requires strong problem-solving, technical depth to understand engineering work on fielded autonomous systems, and judgment to make decisions with impact across teams and planning cycles. The role includes developing the operating model, standards, and team capability; maintaining service quality as product coverage expands; and turning field experience into reliable, actionable insights for product and reliability engineering.

The role also owns support capacity and cost planning, the function’s operating budget, support requirements and pricing input for programs, and executive communication about fleet health, reliability, sustainment costs, and service maturity. Travel of up to 20% is required to support customer needs and operations.

Requirements

• 8+ years of professional experience managing, mastering, and supporting complex technical systems in maritime, aerospace, robotics, defense, automotive, or other electromechanical domains, including leading teams doing this work.
• Bachelor’s degree in engineering, business, or another relevant field.
• Experience managing managers and leading multi-team organizations, with accountability across multiple product lines or programs and responsibility for leaders’ performance and development.
• Experience owning incident-driven workflows at a standard-setting level, including triage, diagnosis, severity assignment, escalation, and resolution across a fielded fleet.
• Sufficient technical depth to follow engineering and specialist 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, including maintenance, spares, and tooling or self-service investments to reduce support burden.
• Experience building and defending quantitative models for support demand, headcount, or cost, including annual planning and ownership of a function’s operating budget, and articulating model assumptions.
• Experience decomposing requirements into deliverables, synthesizing information from multiple sources into recommendations, and driving results across functions and teams.
• 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, and confidence navigating ambiguity and establishing new ways of working.
• Active or eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. Secret Security clearance.

Nice To Haves

• Experience establishing a product support or sustainment function from the ground up, including defining the operating model, growing the team, and running remote support operations for complex robotics systems.
• Defense, law enforcement, or other government agency experience leading operational or technical teams.
• Domain knowledge of maritime and/or aviation systems in a commercial or defense context.
• Consulting or process-maturation project experience, and formal training or certification in continuous improvement or project management, 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 autonomous vehicles, including actuation, power systems, sensing, navigation, and embedded compute, and ability to diagnose connectivity and networking faults across distributed field systems.
• Fluency with fleet data and observability tools such as Grafana, Datadog, Jira, 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 establishing or owning an out-of-hours support capability in a limited-risk-tolerance environment, including on-call rotations.
• An active U.S. Secret clearance or higher, prior military service, or a defense and STEM background.
• Prior clearances or background investigations.

Responsibilities

• Lead Product Operations across the Maritime and Maneuver Dominance portfolio, managing multiple teams and growing sustainment capability and resourcing.
• Own hiring, performance, development, and organizational design while establishing the function’s operating model, standards, and team capabilities.
• Be accountable for the quality of external product support and the quality of VOC insights delivered to internal product teams; understand and improve how work is performed.
• Scale support operations across current and future products and programs, establishing coverage, scope, escalation paths, and infrastructure as products reach fielded maturity.
• Align support headcount to measured support volume, fielded asset population, and product delivery schedules; own annual headcount planning and the M&MD operating budget, and prepare defensible demand calculations.
• Own the division-wide VOC and product reliability workflow, converting field failures into structured insights through failure classification, corrective-action cycle performance, and recurrence measurement.
• Partner with product-aligned engineering teams to turn incidents into systemic improvements, holding partners accountable for using the signal and the organization accountable for its accuracy.
• Establish and enforce standards for triage, diagnosis, escalation, and resolution, including incident severity practices.
• Develop sustainment approaches for complex electromechanical products, including maintenance, spares and hardware actions, configuration and calibration management, and self-service and tooling investments.
• Define and sponsor initiatives to mature the function, specifying outcomes, success measures, and resourcing, and hold program management partners accountable for delivery.
• Serve as the support-requirements point of contact for program teams; 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, communicating fleet health, reliability trends, sustainment cost, and service maturity.
• Surface systemic problems with evidence, drive cross-functional prioritization, and improve understanding among technical teams, program stakeholders, and field operators.
• Travel up to 20% to support customer needs and operations.

Benefits

• Highly competitive equity grants are included in the majority of full-time offers.
• Comprehensive, competitive benefits package available at little to no cost to employees.

What This Job Offers

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