Sr. Director – Operational Excellence

Sr. Director – Operational Excellence

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Operations, Business, or related field, or equivalent combination of education, training, and experience
• Minimum 15+ years of experience in defense, aerospace, or regulated industries with deep exposure to program and product execution, operational improvement, or transformation leadership
• Minimum 7-10 + years of experience leading people
• Proven success leading enterprise-scale operational excellence or business transformation efforts
• Experience working with or integrating product management functions, especially in systems-engineered, regulated product development environments
• Strong knowledge of phase-gated product development models, process architectures, and integrated lifecycle management
• Excellent interpersonal, communication, and leadership skills with the ability to influence at all levels of the organization
• Experience establishing or scaling a Center of Excellence or Operational Excellence function
• Understanding of compliance-driven environments, including EVMS, DCMA audits, and public company operational oversight

Responsibilities

• Champion Operational Excellence: Lead the design, implementation, and governance of an enterprise operational excellence strategy that enhances executional discipline, fosters continuous improvement, and scales with growth in pursuit of delivering on our customer’s needs.
• Enable Product & Process Alignment: Partner with Program/Product Management, Engineering, and Operations teams to embed the company’s product & process framework, ensuring strong linkage between concept, design, development, execution, and operational delivery. Ensure alignment with critical business functional support teams. Own our integrated process framework and lead adoption enterprise wide.
• Drive Strategic Transformation: In coordination with key stakeholders, lead cross-functional initiatives that enhance agility, reduce cycle time, improve quality, and optimize throughput from concept to deployment. Identify key delivery performance issues and partner with organizational stakeholders to ferret out bottlenecks, handoff inefficiency, tooling shortcomings, orphaned responsibilities, and misaligned metrics.
• Build an Enterprise Capability: Establish and manage a scalable Operational Excellence program, including maturity assessments, training, certifications (e.g., Lean Six Sigma), knowledge-sharing communities, and lessons learned. Align process maturity and execution quality with phase-gated development models, from early product definition through transition to production and sustainment.
• Coach & Influence: Mentor leaders and teams across the enterprise to adopt data-driven, customer-aligned thinking; proactively manage risks and tradeoffs between short-term/long-term decision making; and change management best practices across complex efforts.
• Audit for Accountability: Lead internal program and product audits to assess compliance with defined operational processes, phase-gate reviews, and framework standards; identify systemic gaps and partner with stakeholders to drive corrective actions and continuous improvement. Lead operation focused ad-hoc milestones such as Execution Readiness Reviews, or External Solution Reviews.

Preferred Qualifications

• Advanced degree preferred
• Uses vision to think beyond the immediate situation, explore multiple potential paths, and adapt decision-making style based on the situational circumstances
• Inspires, motivates, and empowers people to deliver organizational goals, while also delivering value back to employees
• Brings organizational values to life using personality, uniqueness and the creation of a shared vision
• Champions the process of change and promotes a culture of quick adaptation while helping others deal with the effects of change
• Demonstrates the ability to develop and maintain internal and external trusting, professional relationships
• Assesses the degree of risk and opportunity in plans or actions and takes appropriate action to mitigate them or makes plans to build on the opportunity