Staff Operations Engineer

Role Overview
The Staff Operations Engineer is responsible for acquiring, modifying, certifying, and maintaining an initial safety-critical operational system that will expand into a small fleet. This role owns the operational integrity of those assets across their lifecycle, including regulatory compliance, modification programs, maintenance planning, and operational availability. The position requires deep technical understanding of complex systems, the ability to rapidly develop operational frameworks from scratch, and the judgment to navigate highly regulated environments while enabling unconventional use cases.

Required Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience acquiring, modifying, and maintaining fleets used for non-standard missions within highly regulated environments.
• Ability to rapidly learn complex technical systems to the component and subsystem level, including how those systems interact with regulatory and operational constraints.
• Experience designing and implementing operations and maintenance programs from the ground up, including inspection, maintenance, and availability planning.
• Experience modifying safety-critical or regulated systems for mission profiles outside their original certification or design assumptions.
• Proven ability to operate with high personal ownership over physical assets and their operational readiness, including vendor coordination and technical decision-making.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience managing large or operationally complex fleets while maintaining rapid development or deployment timelines.
• Background in organizations known for building and fielding real hardware systems under aggressive schedules.

Reporting Structure and Scope

This role reports directly to the Founder and CEO and is based onsite in San Diego. It is an individual contributor position without direct reports initially, though the role will coordinate subcontractors, vendors, and maintenance providers as needed.

The Staff Operations Engineer owns the operational lifecycle of the fleet assets under their responsibility. This includes ensuring safe and compliant operation, defining and executing maintenance programs, coordinating and validating modifications, maintaining regulatory standing, and maximizing asset availability for operational use.

The role works closely with engineering teams responsible for related systems to ensure that integrated system performance meets program objectives. As the responsible engineer for the operational subsystem, this position also functions as the product manager for that domain, balancing technical development, operational readiness, regulatory constraints, and mission requirements.