Production Technical Program Manager, Leo

Leo is Amazon's low Earth orbit satellite broadband network. Its mission is to deliver fast, reliable internet to customers and communities around the world, and we've designed the system with the capacity, flexibility, and performance to serve a wide range of customers, from individual households to schools, hospitals, businesses, government agencies, and other organizations operating in locations without reliable connectivity.

Export Control Requirement: Due to applicable export control laws and regulations, candidates must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (i.e., current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum.

This role includes direct responsibility for program management of planning, manufacturing, integration, and test of production value stream. This is a highly technical role requiring experience with data analytics, data modeling, integrated hardware and software as well as some appreciation for complex applications and manufacturing systems. Candidate superpowers should include bias for action, ownership, insist on high standards, stakeholder management, innovation, creating clarity out of ambiguity, and enabling productive collaboration across different organization.

Key job responsibilities

As a Senior Technical Program Manager, you will

• Own the production roadmap for production value streams that delivers the end-to-end solutions necessary to source, build, test and integrate satellites.
• Establish the linkage between production roadmap and annual goals & objectives, creating data models, owning tools and mechanisms to measure, monitor and optimize these value streams.
• Drive daily execution working across supply chain, planning, fullfillment and production teams.
• Represent the overall production roadmap in assessing technical trades related to innovation, speed, manufacturability, cost, stability and trust.
• Translate strategic goals into actionable plans for specific projects and operations.
• Understand dependencies between roadmap projects, synchronize milestones, identify constraints and dive deep where necessary to unblock and deliver the roadmap.
• Create new tools and business processes that simplify, standardize and enable operational excellence across the entire production value stream.
• Develop and own operational rhythms for all of production operations teams
• Identify potential risks in manufacturing processes and develop mitigation strategies and recovery plans.
• Execute a strategic plan that defines how teams will deliver on forward looking production plans.
• Support the development and execution of Production Rate Ramp roadmaps.
• Partner with business teams on scalable, standardized approaches to meet their demand and enable growth.
• Drive the creation, documentation, and adoption of scalable, standardized, and highly visible processes across all supply chain, manufacturing and launch functions.
• Drive executive communication cadence and deliver artifacts that provide insight into the activities, accomplishments, challenges and risks of operations to senior leadership.
• Measure, analyze, improve, and control KPIs across all aspects of the operation.
• Work with software and analytics teams to develop reporting tools and applications that support, operating rhythms
• Analyze production data to identify trends, issues, and opportunities for improvement.
• Support implementation training on new processes or improvements identified through PDCA cycles
• Drive year over year optimization opportunities in all areas of operations, including manufacturing and sourcing.
• Provide feedback/escalate systemic concerns to tech teams regarding approaches that are cost-inefficient or detrimental to scaling.
• Advices production directors and sr. managers on technology and execution decisions.
• Unblocks production teams and increases the speed of delivery. Negotiates resources and priorities across different technology stakeholders.
• Create new tools and business processes that simplify, standardize and enable operational excellence across the entire production value stream.
• Ensure effective communication of changes and improvements across the organization.
• Perform internal audits to assess adherence to procedures, systems and standards.

A day in the life

This role will be highly collaborative, requiring partnerships with cross-functional production stakeholders to drive positive results. This role requires the ability to advocate on behalf of our customers (internal and external) and an ability to push back without being adversarial.

This role will be supporting production of satellite operations across our facilities in Redmond and Kirkland, WA. A typical day for this role will be working directly with production teams and value stream owners on plan execution and check process adherence. Throughout the day, an Sr. Operations TPM for satellite manufacturing must balance strategic planning with hands-on oversight of project execution. Communication skills are crucial, as they interact with various stakeholders including customers, suppliers, and internal teams. The role requires strong leadership to motivate and coordinate teams towards achieving project goals while maintaining a focus on quality, efficiency, and adherence to timelines.

Overall, the role demands strategic thinking, effective leadership, and meticulous oversight to drive satellite manufacturing projects forward successfully. This role will tackle challenging, novel situations every day and have the opportunity to work with multiple technical teams at Amazon in different locations. You should be comfortable with a high degree of ambiguity and relish the idea of solving problems that haven"t been solved at scale before. Along the way, we guarantee that you will learn a lot, have fun and make a positive impact on millions of people.

About the team

Project Kuiper is an initiative to launch a constellation of Low Earth Orbit satellites that will provide low-latency, high-speed broadband connectivity to unserved and underserved communities around the world. To deliver these complex solutions, as the Senior Technical Program Manager you will partner with peers across all Kuiper teams, including hardware, software, supply chain, manufacturing, launch, facilities, finance, compliance, and HR.

This role includes direct responsibility for program management of planning, manufacturing, integration, and test of production value stream. This is a highly technical role requiring experience with integrated hardware and software as well as some appreciation for complex applications and manufacturing systems. Candidate superpowers should include bias for action, ownership, insist on high standards, stakeholder management, innovation, creating clarity out of ambiguity, and enabling productive collaboration across different organization.