Vehicle Manufacturing Program Manager

Company Overview:  

At Relativity Space, we have two audacious goals: to build the next great commercial launch company with Terran R and to become America's leading force in additive manufacturing innovation. Both contribute to our long-term vision of creating humanity’s industrial base on Mars, paving the way for interplanetary life to expand the possibilities of the human experience. This journey begins right here on Earth – where we design, build, and fly rockets to deliver customer payloads to orbit. Terran R, our medium-to-heavy lift reusable rocket, fulfills the growing demand for launch capacity, thanks to our iterative approach that accelerates design, testing, and development while minimizing costs. While our groundbreaking research and development in 3D printing pushes the boundaries of large-scale additive manufacturing.

Your journey with us is more than just a job – it’s an opportunity to shape the future of aerospace technology, additive manufacturing, and the human experience alongside a community of passionate, creative individuals. Join us on this extraordinary journey, as we work together to transform our vision into reality.

About the Team:  

The Manufacturing team at Relativity Space is currently deep in laying the manufacturing groundwork and process development for Terran R, our next generation, re-useable rocket. This team has a wide variety of responsibilities—from determining the most efficient factory floor layout, to developing and implementing complex tooling and processes. The core of this team is interfacing with the vehicle engineering team to heavily influence the design of the rocket. Unique to Relativity, you will get to work across many teams to iterate and support Relativity's first-of-its-kind 3D printing software and robotics technology.

Overall, this team is critical to the development and initial builds of Terran R. This team pulls together the efforts of design, supply chain, additive, vehicle, and manufacturing teams to deliver flight-ready vehicles for test and launch. To meet our goals, we will drive the product from design concept through the build to structural acceptance test and shipment, ensuring the team can move fast while still producing high quality, well understood products.

About the Role: 

This role is primarily focused on upfront vehicle engineering-supply chain-manufacturing program management. You will be accountable for ensuring vehicle engineering releases initial designs and BOM’s on time to support procurement and manufacturing needs. Your core mission is to hold vehicle manufacturing schedule at all costs by focusing on upstream inputs from vehicle engineering and supply chain. A high degree of versatility, detail-orientation, and people skills will be required to be successful in this role. You will be expected to oscillate between big picture and nitty-gritty details on a whim—one day you will be updating design release forecast dates in our scheduling tool; the next day you will be presenting the design release and material planning health to the executive team. Key responsibilities will include:

• Standing up the Vehicle Manufacturing Program. Building the necessary tools, reports, and reviews to ensure a data-backed story on Terran-R’s hardware health is presented and understood by the cross-disciplinary team and leadership.
• Enhancing and maintaining the Vehicle Engineering Release Schedule by forging relationships with key stakeholders (Vehicle Engineering, Manufacturing Engineering, and Supply Chain) and leading thru influence.
• Maintaining and optimizing the Vehicle Manufacturing IMS to ensure all Block 1 vehicle milestones can be achieved. You will partner with the ME, Production, and Production Planning teams to ensure top-down build targets match bottoms-up workcenter realities. When disconnects arise, you are expected to run them down with partners.
• Partnering with supply chain to ensure demand forecasts are clear, understood, and documented via a thorough BOM. Ensuring supply chain is forecasting on-time fulfillment for all piece parts to meet production needs.
• Learning and understanding the details of our system design and manufacturing CONOPS/build flow to provide context to your work.
• Driving an effective cross-disciplinary new product introduction process for Terran-R.

Your main deliverables will be:

• Vehicle Engineering Release Schedule & burndown tools – upkeeping raw data thru effective partnerships and building/maintaining reporting tools to evaluate process & mitigate risks.
• Vehicle Manufacturing IMS
• Agile material planning & fulfillment tracking tools
• Vehicle mBOM – you will partner with the ME team to ensure the vehicle mBOM is accurate, up-to-date, and transferrable to Supply Chain.

About You:  

• 6+ years of program management experience focused on complex hardware new product introduction
• 5+ years of hands-on manufacturing experience of a cross-disciplinary product
• 5+ years of direct scheduling experience, using either Project, Smartsheet, or equivalent
• 2+ years of experience running cross-disciplinary program/manufacturing/system integration reviews
• 2+ years of experience with CAD, ERP, and MES
• Competence developing scrappy data mining, reporting, and analytics tools
• Highly collaborative, strong communication skills, and ability to navigate diverse backgrounds (engineering, technician, executive, etc.)
• Relentless pursuit of holding production and program schedule
• Comfortable with constructive conflict and difficult conversations, so long as it moves the business forward.
• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Supply Chain, Management, Finance, or Operations

Nice to haves but not required:  

• Mastery of Smartsheet, SQL, and Excel

Relativity Space offers competitive salary and equity, a generous vacation policy, an annual L&D stipend and more! 

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.