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 noticedUse standard supply chain processes and partner with the Supply Chain team to develop material replenishment system for the manufacturing areasContribute 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 qualityHave good interpersonal skills, be able to negotiate and manage conflicts of interests.Preferred Qualifications:5 years' of Supervisory experience within an engineering and manufacturing businessLives the “continuous improvement” philosophy; develops and adopts new ideas and conceptsLean 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