The Production Manager is responsible for leading daily manufacturing operations in a highly regulated aerospace and defense environment. This role ensures the safe, efficient, and cost-effective production of aerospace thermal management systems, heat exchangers, and related components while maintaining the highest standards of quality, delivery, and customer satisfaction. Lead from the Floor: This is a hands-on leadership role where you'll work alongside your team to solve problems and improve operations. Drive Operational Excellence: Champion Lean Manufacturing, process improvements, and equipment reliability. Industry-Leading Quality: Help maintain rigorous aerospace quality standards, including customer and NADCAP requirements.
Key Responsibilities:- Develop and manage production plans to meet customer delivery commitments.
- Drive operational excellence through effective resource allocation, workforce planning, and production scheduling.
- Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) including on-time delivery, throughput, scrap, labor efficiency, and schedule attainment.
- Ensure compliance with aerospace and defense quality standards, including AS9100 and customer-specific requirements.
- Partner with Quality and Engineering teams to drive root cause analysis and corrective actions.
- Monitor work center load, labor capacity, tooling availability, and competing priorities to support short- and mid-term execution decisions.
- Bottleneck Forecasting: Forecast bottlenecks before they ground us — and solve them before they're even noticed
- Use standard supply chain processes and partner with the Supply Chain team to develop material replenishment system for the manufacturing areas
- Contribute to annual operating plans and long-term strategic initiatives.
- Manage multiple tasks to successful closure in a fast-paced environment.
Required Qualifications:- Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Manufacturing, Operations Management, or related discipline.
- Knowledge of the SAP system, MS office profound knowledge, supply chain and quality knowledge.
- Strong understanding of Lean Manufacturing, Continuous Improvement, and Operational Excellence methodologies.
- Proven skills as a problem-solver and a record of meeting deadlines and completing tasks on time, on budget and at an acceptable level of quality
- Have good interpersonal skills, be able to negotiate and manage conflicts of interests.
Preferred Qualifications:- 5 years' of Supervisory experience within an engineering and manufacturing business
- Lives the "continuous improvement" philosophy; develops and adopts new ideas and concepts
- Lean Six Sigma Green Belt or Black Belt certification.
- Experience with aerospace thermal management systems, heat exchangers, brazing operations, precision fabrication, welding, or complex assembly environments.
Other Requirements:
Due to the nature of our business programs and products, applicants must have the legal right to work in the US and additionally must be legally authorized to access export-controlled information and source code. Demonstrated ability and willingness to use AI tools to improve productivity, decision-marking, work quality, and to reduce costs. The successful candidate must be able to identify appropriate AI use cases and critically evaluate AI-generated outputs
