Vice President, General Manager

Job Description

Job Description

Title:  Vice President, General Manger

Department: 535200

Revision Date: 

FLSA Status: Exempt

Location: Chandler

Level: M6

Company Overview

Comtech Telecommunications Corp. is a leading global technology company providing terrestrial and wireless network solutions, next-generation 9-1-1 emergency services, satellite and space communications technologies, and cloud native capabilities to commercial and government customers around the world. Our unique culture of innovation and employee empowerment unleashes a relentless passion for customer success. With multiple facilities located in technology corridors throughout the United States and around the world, Comtech leverages our global presence, technology leadership, and decades of experience to create the world’s most innovative communications solutions. For more information, please visit 

Position Summary

The Vice President / General Manager is the senior business leader responsible for the overall performance, growth, and profitability of a technically complex, engineered-products business serving a broad domestic and international customer base.

This leader owns the business end-to-end, including P&L performance, strategy, customers, engineering, new product introduction, program execution, manufacturing, supply chain, quality, commercial execution, talent, facilities, capital deployment, and continuous improvement.

The successful candidate must combine strong business judgment with sufficient technical aptitude to lead an organization developing and manufacturing sophisticated products. This individual does not need to be the chief engineer, but must be capable of understanding technical issues, asking the right questions, challenging assumptions, assessing technical and program risk, and translating engineering decisions into customer, schedule, margin, cash, and business outcomes.

This is a hands-on general management role requiring a leader who can move comfortably between strategy and execution and who understands that sustainable growth requires simultaneous performance across customers, technology, operations, people, and financial results.

Responsibilities:

P&L and Business Leadership

• Own the full business P&L, including revenue, bookings, backlog, gross margin, operating expense, EBITDA/earnings, working capital, cash generation, and capital requirements.
• Establish and execute the annual operating plan and multi-year strategic plan.
• Translate strategy into measurable operating priorities, financial targets, resource requirements, and execution plans.
• Maintain rigorous forecasting and operating discipline across revenue, margin, labor, inventory, capital, program performance, and cash.
• Identify underperforming products, customers, programs, facilities, and cost structures and take timely corrective action.
• Balance near-term financial commitments with investment required for sustainable long-term growth.

Customer and Commercial Leadership

• Serve as a senior executive interface with key customers, strategic partners, government organizations, distributors, and international customers.
• Build and maintain strong relationships across a large and diverse customer base.
• Ensure the organization is responsive to customer requirements while protecting price, margin, scope, contractual position, and cash.
• Participate directly in major negotiations, strategic pursuits, pricing decisions, contract recovery efforts, and customer escalations.
• Strengthen bookings and backlog through reliable execution, customer confidence, new products, and disciplined pursuit of attractive opportunities.

• Ensure commercial terms appropriately address payment milestones, working capital requirements, technical scope, development risk, warranty exposure, and changes in customer requirements.

Engineering and Technology Leadership

• Provide business leadership and operating oversight to engineering and technical organizations responsible for complex engineered products.
• Establish clear priorities among customer-funded development, internal R&D, product sustainment, technical problem solving, and new product development.
• Ensure engineering resources are aligned to the highest-value business and customer priorities.
• Drive disciplined execution of engineering development programs, including requirements definition, design maturity, technical reviews, verification, validation, qualification, and production readiness.
• Challenge technical schedules, staffing assumptions, development estimates, and completion criteria when business performance or customer commitments are at risk.
• Establish effective interaction among engineering, program management, operations, supply chain, quality, sales, and finance.
• Translate technical issues into quantified schedule, cost, margin, customer, and business impacts.

New Product Introduction and Product Portfolio Management

• Lead the business through successful development, introduction, industrialization, and scaling of new products.
• Ensure new products transition effectively from engineering into repeatable production.
• Implement appropriate design-for-manufacturability, producibility, reliability, testability, supply-chain readiness, and cost controls.
• Establish clear NPI gates covering design maturity, sourcing, capital, tooling, test equipment, quality, documentation, training, production readiness, and customer qualification.
• Review the existing product portfolio and rationalize low-volume, obsolete, uncompetitive, or structurally unprofitable offerings when appropriate.
• Ensure R&D and product investments are tied to defined customer demand, competitive differentiation, margin potential, and strategic value.

Operations and Manufacturing

• Lead multi-functional manufacturing operations with accountability for safety, quality, delivery, cost, productivity, capacity, and customer performance.
• Build an operating system based on measurable performance, accountability, root-cause analysis, and corrective action.
• Improve on-time delivery, manufacturing cycle time, labor efficiency, first-pass yield, equipment effectiveness, inventory performance, and quality.
• Ensure production capacity and staffing are aligned with bookings, backlog, demand forecasts, and product introduction requirements.
• Lead facility expansions, consolidations, transfers of work, equipment investments, and footprint optimization when required.
• Establish appropriate capital planning and require clear business cases, returns, execution plans, and post-investment accountability.

Lean Six Sigma and Continuous Improvement

• Champion a practical Lean Six Sigma operating culture focused on measurable business results.
• Apply structured problem solving, root-cause analysis, corrective action, standard work, visual management, 5S, flow, waste elimination, and process control.
• Develop leaders capable of identifying and solving problems rather than escalating every issue.
• Use lean principles across the entire business—not only manufacturing—including engineering, supply chain, program management, finance, and administrative processes.
• Ensure improvement initiatives translate into measurable improvements in margin, cash, quality, delivery, capacity, productivity, or customer performance.