Technical Project Manager - Airborne Optical Systems

Overview

Technical Project Manager - Airborne Optical Systems. This role centers on turning technical ambition into delivered reality within a highly multidisciplinary organization including Engineering Labs (Electrical, Mechanical, Software, Gateware, Systems), Operations, Leadership, and Customers. The role emphasizes outcome ownership—clarifying priorities, managing risk, sequencing interdependencies, and driving decisions in complex, fast-moving environments.

This is a senior role for someone who thrives in ambiguity, brings technical credibility, and leads through influence rather than authority. You will guide programs from early uncertainty through execution, balancing long-term system milestones with short-term tradeoffs in design, supply chain, and resourcing. As PVLabs evolves, you will help shape how programs are planned, governed, and scaled across a growing portfolio of airborne ISR systems. Your Center of Gravity : The PVLabs Engineering Council.

You will work closely with the PVLabs Engineering Council—a small group of Staff and Principal Engineers spanning all engineering disciplines. Rather than micromanaging tasks, you will rely on this group as a force multiplier : translating program priorities into executable engineering work, surfacing technical risk early, and sequencing interdependent deliverables. Your success depends on strong relationships, shared context, and mutual trust—combining your program-level ownership with their deep technical leadership.

What You Will be Responsible For

• Own cost, schedule, risk, and performance across complex technical programs from kickoff through delivery
• Develop and maintain integrated master schedules, technical baselines, and risk frameworks
• Balance engineering ambition with production realities, supply chain constraints, and resourcing limits
• Cross-Functional Leadership : Align Electrical, Mechanical, Software, Optics, and Gateware workstreams
• Translate complex technical data into decision-ready insight for leadership and customers
• Manage stakeholder communication with clarity, urgency, and judgment
• Decision & Dependency Management : Sequence and deconflict interdependent deliverables across disciplines
• Anticipate downstream impacts and resolve issues before they escalate
• Drive tradeoff decisions grounded in realism and system-level thinking
• Process & Scale Enablement : Help shape PVLabs ERP-integrated project management approach, including resource modeling, material planning, and NRE forecasting
• Contribute to how we plan, track, and communicate work as the organization scales

What You're About

We value how people work as much as what they deliver. You are someone who :

Your Background

This role is intentionally not suited to generic project management backgrounds. You have spent a meaningful portion of your career working inside complex, hardware-driven engineering environments—where systems are physical, failure is expensive, and integration risk is real. You understand that managing a program like this requires more than process fluency; it requires technical intuition, judgment under uncertainty, and credibility with engineers.

You likely bring :

You are comfortable operating where :

Explicitly Not a Fit if :

This role will not be a good match if most of your experience comes from :

Those environments develop strong general PM skills—but they do not prepare you for the technical density, decision pressure, and cross-disciplinary integration required here.

What Does Translate

You don’t need to have worked on airborne gimbals specifically—but you do need to have lived inside complex engineered systems where :

If you’ve helped shepherd a difficult system from concept through integration and delivery—and you know why it was hard—you're likely in the right territory.

Why PVLabs?

Because you want to work on something hard, meaningful, and you want to do it with people who are driven, smart, and resourceful. You work best in a place built around autonomy, mastery and purpose — and where performance, trust, and accountability are measured in outputs, not hours. You will be front and center of a mission-driven engineering culture, designing high-performance airborne stabilized imaging systems.

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