Project Manager

Our Caliburn Project Manager is accountable for the delivery of TempestOS and Avalon releases, and for the engineers who build them.

TempestOS is the operating system Caliburn builds for tactical and robotic autonomous systems, and Avalon is the DevSecOps environment through which it is built, hardened, and shipped. A release passes through software and security engineers, and compliance stakeholders before it reaches hardware Caliburn does not own, in environments Caliburn cannot reach. Each of those handoffs is a place where a committed date moves without anyone deciding to move it.

The Project Manager has three key responsibilities:

1. Own the release.
   • Partner with Product Owners and Program Managers to translate roadmap goals into scoped, sequenced engineering milestones with clear owners and exit criteria.
   • Own sprint planning, milestone tracking, and release readiness across TempestOS and Avalon versions, from design through development and deployment.
2. Keep decisions and dependencies moving.
   • Drive alignment across OS engineers, security engineers, and compliance stakeholders. Document decisions and surface tradeoffs so leadership can make informed calls.
   • Identify, resolve, and escalate blockers across workstreams before they become program-level problems.
   • Keep internal teams and external customers current on status, in language calibrated to the audience.
3. Lead the engineers who build and ship it.
   • Manage the engineers assigned to the TempestOS and Avalon delivery teams.
   • Build the conditions those engineers need to do their best work, paying attention to workload, morale, and the clarity of what they have been asked to deliver.

This role has direct reports. The Project Manager owns assignments, growth, and performance for engineers on the TempestOS and Avalon delivery teams. Authority comes from the release commitment and the schedule, and from knowing the true capacity of every team the release depends on.

Planning and Release Ownership

• Maintain the integrated schedule across TempestOS and Avalon, including the dependencies that run between them.
• Verify each milestone against its exit criteria before it is called complete.
• Run release readiness reviews and make the ship or no-ship recommendation with the evidence behind it.
• Track scope changes against the committed baseline and make the cost of a change visible at the time it is proposed.

Cross-Functional Alignment

• Run the coordination rituals between OS engineering, security engineering, and compliance so accreditation and development and dependencies are sequenced into the release rather than discovered at the end.
• Record the decisions and the alternative that was rejected.
• Manage handoffs to field engineering and the customer-facing teams that deploy what the release contains.

Customer and Stakeholder Communication

• Establish and keep a reporting cadence for each audience: the engineering teams, Caliburn leadership, and the customer.
• Give Program Managers and Product Owners early warning when a committed date is at risk, with the recovery plan attached.
• Prepare the delivery picture leadership needs for program reviews and customer engagements.

Team Leadership and Growth

• Set goals, run one-on-ones, and give direct, timely feedback on delivery to the engineers who report to you.
• Own hiring and onboarding for the delivery teams in coordination with HR and Engineering leadership.
• Mentor engineers taking on their first delivery ownership, and grow the bench of people who can run a release.
• Use work objectives as opportunities to define our culture and foster our community, modeling the behavior you want to see in team members.

Process and Continuous Improvement

• Choose the delivery practice that fits the work in front of the team, and change it when it stops fitting.
• Instrument the delivery process enough to see where time is going, and fix what that exposes.
• Work with the platform team on what slows engineers down in the Avalon pipeline, and get it corrected.

Hands-On Contribution

• Work in the AI Native way the delivery teams do. Caliburn employs AI agents across design, development, and business operations with people providing context and oversight. Apply them to planning, status reporting, and risk analysis rather than routing that work elsewhere.
• Attend and contribute to company development meetings, daily stand-up, and demo days.

Core

• Three or more years of project or program management experience driving delivery in a technical engineering environment, including at least one release or milestone owned end to end.
• B.S./B.A. from an accredited university in any degree; ten or more years of relevant work experience accepted in lieu of a degree.
• Experience leading engineers, as a manager or as a delivery lead accountable for their output.
• Written and verbal communication strong enough to translate complex engineering decisions for technical peers, leadership, and external customers.
• Agile fluency. Working familiarity with Scrum, Kanban, or SAFe, and the judgment to adapt them to teams that do not fit a textbook sprint model.
• Ability to manage multiple workstreams simultaneously without losing sight of priorities or dropping handoffs.
• Ability and desire to rapidly develop fluency in new technical domains as the mission requires.
• Familiarity with secure SDLC practices in environments handling sensitive or classified data.
• Experience working with or managing DevSecOps platforms such as GitLab, Artifactory, Harbor, or comparable artifact and pipeline tooling.
• Familiar with AI tools and comfortable with AI Native ways of working.
• US citizenship, required for clearance eligibility and customer site access.
• Active US Department of War Secret clearance, or the ability to obtain and maintain one over the duration of employment.

Preferred

• Master's degree in computer science, electrical engineering, or a related field.
• PMP, Certified ScrumMaster, or equivalent certification.
• Defense, maritime, naval, or autonomous systems program experience.
• Experience delivering software into accredited or classified environments, including authority-to-operate and compliance timelines.
• Working familiarity with Linux-based platforms, containers, or Kubernetes.
• Prior Navy, Marine Corps, or Joint service experience, particularly in engineering, cyber, or unmanned systems roles.

Cultural

• Bias toward unblocking. Gets satisfaction from clearing an obstacle for someone else, not only from running the plan.
• Honest about reality. Brings problems to the team rather than softening them. A date that is slipping gets reported when it starts slipping.
• Leadership By Example. Models the behavior they want to see in their team members.
• Team-First Mentality. The ability and desire to work collaboratively across engineering, security, and program teams.
• Passion. A natural commitment toward our vision of Securing Physical AI.
• Startup Stamina. Caliburn is changing the world at the intersection of industrial systems and advanced software. Sometimes changing the world requires long hours, in-person work, and significant travel in support of our customers.