Director of Sustainment Engineering

In this role, you’ll lead the engineering discipline responsible for the reliability, maintainability, availability and total lifecycle support of fielded drone platforms, building and leading a team of sustainment, reliability and field support engineers and serving as the primary engineering authority for in-service issues. Lead root-cause and corrective action (RCCA) investigations for field failures, anomalies and in-service issues, and drive closed-loop corrective and preventive actions.

Eleven Recruiting is searching for a Director of Sustainment Engineering for a growing defense drone manufacturer in the greater Los Angeles area. In this role, you’ll lead the engineering discipline responsible for the reliability, maintainability, availability and total lifecycle support of fielded drone platforms, building and leading a team of sustainment, reliability and field support engineers and serving as the primary engineering authority for in-service issues.
  Responsibilities:

• Own the engineering strategy and roadmap for sustainment of fielded drone systems, including airframes, propulsion, avionics, payloads and ground control systems.
• Build, lead and mentor a multidisciplinary sustainment engineering team covering reliability, field/product support, obsolescence and configuration engineers.
• Lead root-cause and corrective action (RCCA) investigations for field failures, anomalies and in-service issues, and drive closed-loop corrective and preventive actions.
• Partner with Design Engineering to translate field data and lessons learned into design improvements, engineering change orders (ECOs) and product upgrades.
• Establish and maintain reliability, maintainability and availability (RM&A) metrics, and drive data-driven decisions on fleet health and readiness.
• Own obsolescence management and diminishing manufacturing sources (DMSMS) planning for electronic and mechanical components.
• Direct development of technical manuals, maintenance procedures, repair schemes and training materials in support of fielded systems.
• Manage engineering support for depot-level and field-level repair, overhaul and modification programs.
• Serve as the senior engineering point of contact for customer sustainment reviews, technical interchange meetings (TIMs) and program reviews.
• Collaborate with Supply Chain and Manufacturing on spares provisioning, repair vendor qualification and total lifecycle cost reduction.
• Ensure sustainment engineering activities comply with applicable FAA, DoD and customer airworthiness and configuration management requirements.
• Own the sustainment engineering budget, staffing plan and departmental goals, and report fleet health and program status to executive leadership.
• Support proposal efforts and new program capture with sustainment engineering scope, staffing and cost estimates.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Aerospace, Mechanical, Electrical or a related engineering discipline (Master’s preferred).
• 10+ years of engineering experience in aerospace, defense or unmanned systems, including 5+ years in sustainment, reliability, product support or in-service engineering.
• 3+ years of people leadership experience, managing engineers and cross-functional teams.
• Demonstrated experience with root-cause analysis methodologies (e.g., 8D, Fishbone/Ishikawa, FRACAS, FMEA).
• Working knowledge of reliability engineering principles, RM&A metrics and lifecycle sustainment planning.
• Experience with configuration management and engineering change processes in a regulated manufacturing environment.
• Familiarity with unmanned aircraft systems, avionics or small-UAS platforms.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to represent engineering to customers, program management and executive leadership.
• U.S. Person status required due to ITAR.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience supporting fielded military or government UAS/drone programs through their full lifecycle.
• Familiarity with MIL-STD reliability/maintainability standards (e.g., MIL-STD-1629A, MIL-HDBK-217) and airworthiness sustainment requirements.
• Experience standing up or scaling a sustainment/product support engineering function.
• Six Sigma / Lean or reliability engineering certification (CRE).

Salary: $200,000 - $250,000

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