Spacecraft Production Control Manager

K2 Space•Los Angeles, CA

About The Position

K2 is seeking a hands-on manufacturing leader to build and lead its Production Control function. The role owns manufacturing scheduling, production coordination, work-order readiness, material readiness, and work-in-process management across satellite production work centers. It translates delivery milestones into a factory schedule and develops the systems and team needed to support increasing production rates. The manager partners with Production Leadership, Supply Chain, Manufacturing Engineering, and Quality to maintain production flow, resolve constraints, and establish scalable production systems. The role also develops the team, integrated schedule, readiness processes, capacity models, and performance measures needed to support factory rate ramps. The person hired will have access to items controlled by U.S. export regulations and must be a U.S. person as defined by applicable regulations or otherwise eligible for a federally issued export-control license.

Requirements

At least 8 years of experience in production control, scheduling, or production planning in a high-volume, rapid-production environment in aerospace, defense, or complex hardware manufacturing.
At least 3 years of experience managing schedulers, planners, or coordinators.
Experience building or scaling a production-control or planning function.
Experience owning a factory-level production schedule through a rate ramp.
Deep working knowledge of build trees, bills of materials, routings, work orders, and MRP/ERP and MES data flow.
Experience building capacity and scheduling models that drive start, staffing, and capital-expenditure decisions.
Strong floor-presence experience partnering with supervisors, engineering, and leadership.

Nice To Haves

Experience in spacecraft, launch vehicle, defense, or complex electromechanical manufacturing.
Experience with production analytics tools such as Smartsheet, SQL, Python, or Power BI for shortage monitoring and schedule automation.
Bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering, operations research, supply chain, or a related engineering field.

Responsibilities

Own Production Control operations, including manufacturing scheduling, production coordination, work-order readiness, and WIP management.
Grow the Production Control team by hiring and developing Production Schedulers and Production Coordinators.
Own the integrated factory schedule, translating program delivery milestones into vehicle takt, subassembly starts, and prioritized work-order lists with daily and weekly goals for each work center.
Develop hardware-allocation scenarios that account for customer needs, delivery milestones, and quality requirements, and align stakeholders on build priorities.
Establish manufacturing-readiness processes covering material availability, work orders, tooling, labor capacity, and engineering requirements.
Develop production-control systems, including automated schedules, capacity models, and readiness models integrated across MES, Smartsheet, and internal tools.
Monitor SQL-based MRP and partner with Supply Chain to resolve shortages and align supplier commitments with manufacturing demand.
Conduct work-center and factory-level capacity analysis and recommend staffing, capital expenditures, and process changes for each production-rate step.
Establish and monitor KPIs for schedule attainment, manufacturing readiness, WIP, production flow, and on-time delivery.
Lead root-cause analysis and corrective action for schedule slips across assembly and integration.
Communicate production risks, resource requirements, and recovery plans to the Director of Production and VP of Manufacturing.