Senior Program Manager, Production Operations, Project Kuiper

Project Kuiper is an initiative to increase global broadband access through a constellation of 3,236 satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO). Its mission is to bring fast, affordable broadband to unserved and underserved communities around the world. Project Kuiper will help close the digital divide by delivering fast, affordable broadband to a wide range of customers, including consumers, businesses, government agencies, and other organizations operating in places without reliable connectivity.

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.

Key job responsibilities
As a Senior 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 and objectives, creating and owning tools and mechanisms to measure, monitor and optimize these value streams
* Drive daily execution working across supply chain, planning, fulfillment 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 senior 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

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.


A day in the life
This role will be highly collaborative, requiring partnerships with cross-functional production stakeholders to drive positive results. This role will support the production of satellite operations across our facilities in Redmond and Kirkland, Washington. Throughout the day, an Operations Program Manager for satellite manufacturing must balance strategic planning with hands-on oversight of project execution.

This role requires the ability to advocate on behalf of our customers, both internal and external, and the ability to push back without being adversarial. Communication skills are crucial, as you will interact with various stakeholders including customers, suppliers, and internal teams. A typical day for this role will involve working directly with production teams and value stream owners on plan execution and checking process adherence. This role will tackle challenging, novel situations every day and have the opportunity to work with multiple technical teams at Amazon in different locations.

To deliver these complex solutions, you will partner with peers across all Kuiper teams, including hardware, software, supply chain, manufacturing, launch, facilities, finance, compliance, and human resources. 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 successfully drive satellite manufacturing projects forward. 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
The vision of OPM team is to enable success of end-to-end Kuiper operations team by proactively developing systems, processes, mechanisms, and tools that are required to detect issues, expose root cause, validate improvements, maintain controls, and drive operational rhythms. OCC is a force multiplier, identifying and accelerating the speed which operating teams achieve goals with fewer resources. The goal of the team is to drive solution to business problems.