Senior Manager, Process Assurance

About You:

You have spent years inside engineering organizations that built certified aircraft systems, and you know that a program lives or dies on the rigor of the process behind it. You have written, audited, or defended process documentation that successfully completed regulatory System Reviews/ Process Assurance audits. You have strong leadership and communications skills and a passion for developing and leading new initiatives backed by your years of experience. You lead by building relationships and processes, and you know how to get a team of engineers with different specialties, working in a fast-paced environment pulling in the same direction.

Merlin Labs builds autonomous aviation systems for civil and defense customers, and the engineering organization behind that work needs a leader who owns the process backbone supporting certification across multiple programs. You will lead a team of engineers responsible for configuration management, development assurance, process assurance, and software quality reporting to the VP of Airworthiness & Certification.

If you want to build the process infrastructure that enables a fast-moving company to certify complex autonomous systems repeatably instead of reinventing it every program, this is the role for you.

Responsibilities:

• Lead and grow a team of engineers spanning configuration management, development assurance, process assurance, and software quality assurance.
• Own configuration management and partner with key leaders in the engineering and flight test organization to manage the development, maintenance, and continuous improvement of these processes.
• Partner with all technical leaders to standardize and deploy core processes within engineering, ensuring they comply with established policies and guidance, and reflect best practices to support future certification.
• Establish and run a compliance auditing program verifying that engineering process documents and their execution meet established policy and guidance for military and civil certification of autonomous systems.
• Represent process assurance in interactions with certification authorities, designated engineering representatives, and customer quality, providing objective evidence of process compliance and maturity.
• Serve as the primary point of contact for DCMA and other government quality assurance representatives on military programs, providing evidence of process compliance during surveillance and audits.
• Drive continuous improvement of engineering processes based on audit findings, program lessons learned, and evolving regulatory guidance, balancing rigor with the pace a fast-growing company requires.
• Lead root-cause and corrective action analysis to close audit findings and prevent recurrence.
• Report to the VP of Airworthiness & Certification on process health, audit outcomes, open findings, and the improvement roadmap across engineering.
• Build scalable, repeatable process frameworks so process assurance stays ahead of planned growth.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in engineering or a related technical field, with 12+ years of experience in aerospace systems, software, or hardware development, including significant experience in configuration management, process assurance, and development assurance.
• Direct working knowledge on completed certification programs of configuration management, DO-178C, DO-254, ARP4754A/B, and ARP4761A.
• Working knowledge of software/tool qualification (DO-330) as applied to development and verification tools used on certification programs.
• 5+ years of experience leading or managing a team of engineers, including hiring, mentoring, and performance management across multiple technical disciplines.
• Experience developing, auditing, or defending engineering process documentation for regulatory or customer compliance with a track record of successful internal or external audits (System Reviews, e.g., FAA Stage of Involvement per Order 8110.4C/8110.49).
• Working knowledge of military airworthiness process, civil (FAA) certification frameworks, systems safety, and quality management system standards (e.g., SAE EIA-649B, MIL-STD-882E, AS9100D) as applied to engineering process documentation.
• U.S. citizenship required and ability to obtain security clearance.

Nice to Have:

• Experience with ASTM F3230 and F3061 consensus standards, or other Part 23 / consensus-based certification bases relevant to small and autonomous aircraft.
• Experience leading development and implementation of complex PLM tools
• Experience managing problem reporting tools including standardization and analytics across common programs.
• Background in autonomous or unmanned aviation systems, or another safety-critical domain where process rigor and rapid iteration must coexist.
• Experience building or scaling configuration management and process assurance functions in a startup.
• Active clearance. TS preferred.
• Experience with CMMI-based process maturity appraisals for DoD-facing engineering organizations.
• Experience with airworthiness cybersecurity certification (DO-326A/ED-202A, DO-356A) and integrating security risk assessment into certification evidence.