Space Industrial Engineer-Senior

POSITION SUMMARY

Provides industrial engineering support to the Missile Tracking Division, which owns the LEO and MEO missile tracking layers. The work is production and throughput: how fast the supplier base can actually build and test proliferated spacecraft, where the integration and test flow bottlenecks are, and whether the schedules the contractors assert are achievable against observed factory capacity. MT is the single biggest fill problem on this contract and the least staffed division; the incumbent will carry real analytical ground from the first week.

ESSENTIAL DUTIES

•   Assess contractor manufacturing readiness. Support Manufacturing Readiness Assessments and MRL determinations at vendor facilities, and prepare the findings the Government uses at milestone decisions.

•   Analyze production rate, factory throughput and capacity across the spacecraft bus, payload and ground supplier base. Model the effect of overlapping tranche and epoch schedules on delivery.

•   Evaluate assembly, integration and test flow — including thermal vacuum, vibration, acoustic and EMI/EMC facility availability — and identify the constraints that drive schedule risk.

•   Review the Integrated Master Schedule and critical path. Reconcile contractor schedule assertions against observed production status rather than accepting them as reported.

•   Support earned value analysis where it bears on the technical baseline; isolate variances with an industrial rather than a reporting cause.

•   Conduct producibility and design-for-manufacture assessments on proposed engineering change proposals and class I changes.

•   Track long-lead items, parts obsolescence and DMSMS, and single- or sole-source supply chain exposure across the tracking layer vendors.

•   Write candidate risks with a defensible industrial basis — likelihood, consequence and handling — and carry them through the division risk board.

•   Perform process analysis on Government and contractor workflows and recommend improvements that the division can actually implement.

•   Provide industrial engineering inputs to program reviews — PMR, SRR, PDR, CDR, TRR — and brief findings directly to the Government customer.

•   Produce decision-quality analysis products: briefings, white papers, trade studies and position papers for the Division Chief and program managers.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

•   Bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering, systems engineering, manufacturing engineering or a closely related engineering discipline. A non-engineering degree requires a Government waiver, which MAINSAIL must request and the Government must grant before the candidate can start.

•   More than ten years of relevant experience, per the OASIS+ Senior definition. Years are the contract’s measure, not degrees.

•   Demonstrable ownership of a production line, a subsystem, a technical baseline or a defined technical area — not participation on a team that owned one.

•   Ability to brief a Government customer without a minder. The Senior level on this contract is expected to stand in front of the division and defend its own analysis.

•   Working command of manufacturing readiness levels, production capacity analysis, integrated master schedule and critical path method, and formal risk management.

•   Active Secret clearance with last date of access inside twenty-four months. Past that point reciprocity does not apply and a new investigation is required.

•   On site at Los Angeles AFB. This billet does not telework.

DESIRED

•   Space vehicle or payload production experience — bus, payload or ground segment hardware, at a prime or a major supplier.

•   Proliferated constellation production experience: SDA Tranche spacecraft, MEO missile tracking epochs, or comparable high-rate satellite manufacture.

•   Prior SETA, FFRDC or Government support to Space Systems Command, the former SMC, or another DoD acquisition program office.

•   Lean Six Sigma certification; DAU acquisition or production coursework.

•   Working familiarity with EVMS and with schedule tooling — Microsoft Project, Primavera, Acumen Fuse or equivalent.

•   Clearance eligibility above Secret, or a willingness to be submitted for upgrade.

MAINSAIL Group provides systems engineering and technical assistance, advisory and assistance services, and program management support to Air Force, Space Force and Navy customers. MAINSAIL and its joint ventures manage Secret, Top Secret, SCI and Special Access Program requirements at customer sites across the United States.