Production Manager, Aerospace

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