Senior Product Operations Manager

ABOUT THE COMPANY

Anduril Industries is a defense technology company with a mission to transform U.S. and allied military capabilities with advanced technology. By bringing the expertise, technology, and business model of the 21st century's most innovative companies to the defense industry, Anduril is changing how military systems are designed, built and sold. Anduril's family of systems is powered by Lattice OS, an AI-powered operating system that turns thousands of data streams into a realtime, 3D command and control center. As the world enters an era of strategic competition, Anduril is committed to bringing cutting-edge autonomy, AI, computer vision, sensor fusion, and networking technology to the military in months, not years.

ABOUT THE TEAM

Product Operations is the team accountable for the health of the systems and technology that delivers the capabilities our customers depend on. The function identifies, triages, and drives resolution of incidents across the deployed fleet, and converts what is learned in the field 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.

The Maritime and Manuever Dominance (M&MD) teams we support build world-class autonomous robotics platforms, often deployed and operating cooperatively across multiple domains. The team is responsible for taking products like Altius, Ghost, Bolt, Anvil, Omen, Dive-LD, Dive-XL, Copperhead, and Seabed Sentry from concept to operational systems, advancing the state-of-the-possible in multi-asset autonomous robotics.

ABOUT THE ROLE

As the Senior Manager of Product Operations for Maritime and Maneuver Dominance, you will own product operations across the division's product portfolios and the programs that deliver those products. You will lead multiple Product Operations managers and Product Operations Engineers. Each of whom either leads multiple teams of technical specialists and engineers focused on supporting and improving fielded products, or works closely with product engineers to design in sustainment and customer experience centric feature sets based off of clear VOC Product Operations derived insights. The division's portfolio is scaling, and this role exists to build the support function that scales with it, both for the products it covers first and for the ones that reach the field next.

In this role, you will be building the function as much as operating it, and this 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 autonomous systems, and the judgment to make decisions with impact that reaches beyond your own organization and the current planning cycle. If you are passionate about cutting-edge technology, advancing national security, and delivering best-in-class operational support services, Anduril invites you to join the team.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

Build and Grow the Function: Lead Product Operations across the Maritime and Maneuver Dominance 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 building the function itself: the operating model, the standards, and the capability of the people within it.

Own Service Quality, Internal and External: Hold accountability for the quality of product support delivered to external customers and the quality of VOC signal delivered to internal Anduril product teams. Understand the work at every level of the team, 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 and the function's operating budget for M&MD, and produce defensible demand calculations when planning cycles call for them.

Own the VOC Signal and the fielded product Reliability Loop across the division: Own implementation and measurement of the workflow that converts field failures into structured, high confidence signal for product and reliability engineering teams across the division’s portfolio, spanning failure mode classification, root cause corrective action cycle performance, and recurrence measurement. Ensure adequate partnership and pathways for product aligned teams to abstract individual incidents into systemic improvements, holding engineering partners accountable to the signal provided and your 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. Build 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 across the business, defining the end state, the measure of success, and the resourcing required. 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: Ability to travel up to 20% to support customer needs and operations.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Proven Technical Leadership: 8+ years of professional experience managing, mastering, and supporting complex technical systems (maritime, aerospace, robotics, defense, automotive, or other electromechanical domains), including time spent leading the teams that do that work.
• Education: Bachelor's degree in a engineering, business, or other relevant field
• Organizational Leadership: Experience managing managers and leading multi-team organizations, with accountability for outcomes across more than one product line or program, and for the performance and development of the leaders within it.
• 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 and an operating budget for a function, and stating the assumptions behind the model.
• Program Management: Experience decomposing requirements into deliverables, synthesizing information from several sources into a clear recommendation, and driving that recommendation to a result across multiple functions and teams.
• 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 operational or technical teams.
• Domain knowledge of maritime and/or aviation systems, in a commercial or defense context.
• Consulting or process maturation project experience, and formal training or certification in a continuous improvement or project management discipline (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 autonomous vehicles, including actuation, power systems, sensing, navigation, and embedded compute, and the ability to diagnose connectivity and networking faults across distributed field systems.
• Enough fluency with fleet data and observability tooling, such as Grafana, Datadog, Jira, SQL, and Palantir Foundry, to interrogate your own organization's analysis.
• 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 establishing or owning an out-of-hours support capability in a limited risk tolerance environment, including the on-call rotations behind it.
• An active U.S. Secret clearance or higher, prior military service, or a defense and STEM background.