Senior Manager, Product Operations

ABOUT THE TEAM

Frontier Systems (AFS) is focused on positioning Anduril as a lead provider of specialized hardware and software products for defense, law enforcement, and intelligence customers. We work alongside our customers to understand their requirements and deliver exquisite capabilities across their problem set. We aim to develop and deploy critically needed capabilities that address our customers' most pressing national security requirements.

Product Operations is the team accountable for the health of the systems and technology that delivers the capabilities that our customers depend on. The function identifies, triages, and drives resolution of incidents across the deployed fleet, and converts what we've learned into the reliability and sustainment insights that product and engineering teams act upon. We work in close coordination with product engineering, reliability, quality, program management, and field operations teams to maximize capability availability for our end users and inform the next cycle of iterations.

ABOUT THE ROLE

As the Senior Manager of Product Operations for Frontier Systems, you will own product operations across the division's product portfolio and the programs that deliver those products. You will lead multiple Product Operations managers, each of whom runs a team of technical specialists and engineers focused on supporting and improving fielded products. The division's portfolio is scaling, and this role exists to scale support alongside it, both for the products the function covers today and for the ones that reach the field next.

This is a function maturation and growth role as much as an operating one, and the work rewards depth. The position requires a strong problem-solving mindset, enough technical depth to follow the work of the engineers and specialists supporting fielded robotic systems, and the judgment to make decisions whose impact reaches beyond your own team and the current planning cycle. If you are passionate about cutting-edge technology, advancing national security, and delivering best-in-class operational support, Anduril invites you to join the team.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

Lead and Grow the Function: Lead Product Operations across the Frontier Systems portfolio, managing multiple teams and driving the growth of both sustainment capability and resourcing across the division. Own hiring, performance, development, and organizational design, while also maturing the function itself: the operating model, the standards, and the capability of the people in it.

Own Service Quality, Internal and External: Hold accountability for the quality of product support delivered to external customers and to internal Anduril teams. Understand the work at every level, both how it is expected to be done and how it is actually being done, and close the distance between the two.

Scale Support Operations Across the Portfolio: Think strategically about how support scales across the division's full portfolio, current and future. Extend Product Operations coverage to new products and programs as they reach fielded maturity, standing up scope, coverage, escalation paths, and support infrastructure where none exists. All while holding service quality steady as the fielded population grows.

Align Capacity to Demand: Align support headcount demand to measured support volume, fielded asset population, and product delivery schedules. Own annual headcount planning for the function and produce defensible demand calculations when planning cycles call for them.

Own the Failure Signal and the fielded product Reliability Loop: Own the workflow that converts field failures into structured, trustworthy signal for product and reliability engineering, spanning failure mode classification, root cause corrective action cycle performance, and recurrence measurement. Partner with engineering to abstract individual incidents into systemic improvements, holding engineering partners accountable to the signal provided and your own organization accountable to its fidelity.

Set the Support and Sustainment Standard: Establish and enforce the standards by which the organization triages, diagnoses, escalates, and resolves product incidents, including the severity discipline that determines what reaches engineering and when. Mature the sustainment approach for complex electromechanical products supporting the evolution of maintenance, spares and hardware action, configuration and calibration management, and the self-service and tooling investments that reduce support burden over time.

Sponsor Function Initiatives: Outline and sponsor the initiatives that mature the function, defining the end state, the measure of success, and the resourcing. Then hold program management partners accountable for leading and delivering the targeted outcomes.

Be the Interface for Support Requirements: Serve as the point of contact program teams come to when assessing product and customer service support requirements for new and expanding programs. Characterize the cost of the service and define the contract and pricing structures that fund it, in support of proposals and modifications.

Brief Executive Stakeholders: Represent product support to business line and division leadership through recurring reviews of fleet health, reliability trends, sustainment cost, and the maturation of the service. Surface systemic problems with evidence, drive cross-functional prioritization, and help deeply technical teams, program stakeholders, and operators in the field understand each other.

Travel and Availability: Ability to travel up to 20% to support customer needs and operations, and to work non-standard hours when fielded operations require it.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Proven Technical Leadership: 8+ years of professional experience managing, mastering, and supporting complex technical systems (robotics, aerospace, defense, automotive, or other electromechanical domains).
• Education: Bachelor's degree in a technical or related field, OR equivalent hands-on technical experience (military, industrial, or field support).
• Organizational Leadership: Experience leading managers and multi-team organizations, with accountability for outcomes across more than one product line or program.
• Incident Workflow Ownership: Experience owning incident-driven workflows at a standard-setting level, including triage, diagnosis, severity assignment, escalation, and resolution across a fielded fleet.
• Technical Depth: Enough technical depth to follow the work of engineers and specialists supporting fielded robotic and electromechanical systems, including the ability to reason across hardware, software, and networking boundaries.
• Reliability Workflow Familiarity: Demonstrated familiarity with product improvement or reliability lifecycles and processes.
• Sustainment Approach: Experience defining a sustainment model for fielded hardware across its service life, spanning maintenance, spares, and the tooling or self-service investments that reduce support burden.
• Capacity and Cost Modeling: Experience building and defending quantitative models that size support demand, headcount, or cost, including owning annual planning for a function and stating the assumptions behind the model.
• Program Management: Project and program management ability applied outside a project management role: decomposing requirements into deliverables, synthesizing information from several sources into a clear recommendation, and driving that recommendation to a result across multiple functions.
• Executive Influence: Proven ability to align senior cross-functional leadership and influence outcomes without authority over the people who deliver them, including briefing executive stakeholders on operational performance.
• Communication: Excellent written, visual, and verbal communication skills, and confidence navigating ambiguity and establishing new ways of working where none exist.
• Clearance: Active or eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. Secret Security clearance. Holding clearances or background investigations in the past is a plus.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

We recognize that great leaders come from diverse backgrounds. We do not expect you to meet every single one of these criteria:

• 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 air defense, intelligence, and/or force protection teams.
• Consulting or process maturation project experience, and formal training or certification in a continuous improvement or project management disciplines (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 the failure behavior of fielded robotic and sensor systems, including actuation, power systems, sensing, embedded compute, radar, RF detection, and electro-optical and infrared sensing, and the ability to diagnose connectivity and networking faults across distributed field systems.
• Comfort reading logs, telemetry, and test data, including hands-on use of Linux command-line interfaces and tooling such as Grafana, Datadog, Jira, Git, SQL, and Palantir Foundry.
• Experience translating support scope into contract or pricing structures for operations and sustainment, and familiarity with proposal efforts.
• Fluency with the data layer of sustainment, including incident management systems, asset and configuration data, service bill of materials, and cost association.
• Experience in on-call support operations and limited risk tolerance environments.
• An active U.S. Secret clearance or higher, prior military service, or a defense and STEM background.