Head of Production and Programming

Full-time

Target start: First Order Effects (FOE) is building America’s Infrastructure Prime for the robotic era. Autonomous ships, drones, and robots are rewriting how the world moves, fights, and builds. Our team comes from SpaceX, Anduril, Saronic, Lockheed Skunk Works, Forterra, and Fuse Energy. Before founding FOE, we built satellite ground stations that closed a national comms gap in days, deployed multi-megawatt power systems at commercial speed, and shipped autonomous surface vessels into Navy fleet production. FOE wins work by moving faster than the government expects and speaking the government’s language better than our competitors do. That requires someone who has lived on the other side of the table: a former NAVSEA, warfare center, or similar acquisition professional who can take a customer’s capability need and drive it through top-level requirements, derived system requirements, and a test and evaluation plan, then walk it back up through verification without dropping a thread.

You sit at the junction of all three, shaping captures with technically credible solutions, translating won work into executable requirements baselines, and making sure what engineering builds is what the customer can accept, test, and field.

This role owns the customer requirement and the program’s obligation to meet it. You know how a requirement becomes a contract line item. You have personally authored or approved requirements documents, SRVMs, and T&E plans that survived government gate reviews. Furthermore, you still have the relationships with program office, warfare center, and technical authority contacts who return your calls.

Own the customer requirements thread on every FOE program, from the initial capability need through top-level requirements, derived system requirements, and test and evaluation planning, and back up through verification and validation closure. You are the technical voice in the room when growth shapes an opportunity, and the author of the solution framework that anchors our proposals. Produce requirements baseline artifacts: requirements documents, requirements verification matrices, T&E master plans, and gate review packages, produced to a standard the government recognizes as its own.

Own MIL-STD and specification compliance strategy by knowing which standards apply, which to negotiate, and how to write compliance language that protects both the program and the company.

Manage government stakeholders, including program offices, warfare centers, technical authorities, and operational test agencies. Run the growth/programs/engineering interface to provide internal translation between what the customer needs, what we promised, and what we are building. you sit in them as the customer’s proxy, not the chair.

Requirements packages: complete, gate-reviewed requirements baselines (including requirements document, verification matrix, and T&E plan) delivered for every active FOE program.

Verification closure: verification events executed to plan, with closure rates tracked and no requirement orphaned between engineering and test.

Customer confidence: documented technical exchanges with government program offices and warfare centers, and customer acceptance of FOE-authored technical baselines without major rework.

You have personally taken a capability need through top-level requirements, derived requirements, and T&E planning, and closed the loop through verification. Working knowledge of the MIL-STD ecosystem and how to apply it without gold-plating, including MIL-STD-961, 810, 1472, and the DoD specification and standards structure, plus the judgment to tailor rather than blindly flow down.

Fluency in DoD acquisition structures. You have supported captures and proposals, managed program execution, and argued with engineers about derived requirements, and you can switch between those registers in a single meeting.

Strong technical writing. Your requirements documents and technical volumes read like the government wrote them, because you used to.

For tasks such as requirements decomposition, verification matrix generation, compliance mapping, and technical volume drafting, you use AI to compress the timeline. You should be able to articulate, in interview, how you use AI today to outpace peers while maintaining policy compliant use of AI tools.

DoD Secret clearance at minimum; Bonus Points

Engineering Duty Officer, Acquisition Corps, or DAWIA-certified background (Program Management or Engineering, Level II/III).

Prior experience at a defense tech company or major prime translating government requirements practice into a commercial-speed environment.

150,000-$190,000 base + founding-team equity sized for the role + benefits. S. citizen, lawful permanent resident, or protected individual as defined by 8 U.S. security clearance; employment with FOE is governed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications and will not be influenced in any manner by race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability or any other legally protected status.