Director, Program Management (R3036)

Seeking a Director of Program Management to help lead the development and delivery of transformative Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Shield AI’s segment of products delivering autonomy to crewed and uncrewed aircraft.

WHAT YOU'LL DO:

• Program Leadership: Oversee the execution of active programs, ensuring delivery on scope, schedule, and budget while meeting customer expectations. 
• Strategic Shaping: Partner with the capture team to align organizational capabilities with future opportunities, contributing to proposal development and program planning. 
• Team Development: Build and stand up teams to support growth into emerging domains and international markets, fostering collaboration across functions. 
• Growth Strategy: Identify opportunities for program expansion, supporting market entry strategies and positioning the organization as a leader in autonomy and AI solutions. 
• International Markets: Engage with global stakeholders to meet unique requirements, ensuring compliance with export controls and other regulations. 
• Establish clear objectives: Work closely with product managers, and technical leads to establish clear objectives traceable to mission impact, strategic impact, financial outcomes, and program objectives.
• Project Management: Define project plans including milestones, timelines, and interdependencies. Estimate, allocate, and track resources. Establish efficient and effective battle rhythm for communication, coordination, decision making, quality control, and work-product delivery
• Drive Timely, High Quality, Critical Decisions: While TPMs aren't expected to design systems, they shall possess a strong technical understanding to drive the process of swift, rigorous, good technical decision making.
• Communicate with excellence: Ensure stakeholders with dependencies are aware of status, milestones, and any challenges. Ensure suppliers understand stakes, intent, and expectations.
• Empower the team: Obsess over whether your teams are empowered with a) the time, information, and tools to be effective b) clear and appropriate accountability, authority, and resourcing c) effective, efficient, swift processes and policies. Destroy obstacles to progress – anything that diminishes the capabilities of the team.
• Deliver outcomes: Oversee and material contribute to the curation and creation of technical documentation to ensure engineering outputs are properly delivered to “customer” organizations. RTM packages, Work Instructions, Engineering Change Orders, Service Bulletins, Flight Crew Information Files, Flight Manuals and Service Manuals.
• People management: Supervise and mentor a team of program managers, providing guidance, support, and performance feedback to execute a portfolio of projects contributing to the primary software product. 

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• Bachelor’s in engineering, Computer Science, or a related field, and 10 years of relevant experience 
• 5+ years of experience in technical program management or managing product development lifecycles
• Proven track record of leading and facilitating cross-functional teams to successfully bringing products to market.
• Self-starter with a proven track record of forging clarity and structure in the face of ambiguous or dynamic constraints.
• World-class analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to quickly synthesize disparate viewpoints to deliver well-informed, data-backed decisions.
• Relentless learner who can develop specialized knowledge in niche domains.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills. 
• Eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. Secret clearance.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• Experiencing owning and driving technical projects that balance engineering development realities against the speed of business growth.
• Experience translating technical information and customer needs into comprehensible product narratives.
• Experience conducting product, technology, and market discovery with subject matter experts.
• Defense, national security, or aerospace domain familiarity through employment or education.