Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI’s technology actively supports operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and YouTube.
Job Description:
The Sustainment Project Manager is a senior individual contributor responsible for driving execution discipline across V-BAT sustainment activities. This role owns the operating rhythm, escalation mechanisms, and cross-functional execution framework required to move technical escalations, corrective actions, configuration actions, obsolescence actions, service actions, and customer-impacting sustainment priorities to closure.
This role partners closely with Fleet Support, Sustainment Engineering, Product Engineering, Quality, Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Customer Success, and Operations to ensure sustainment actions are prioritized, resourced, tracked, and completed on timelines that support fleet readiness, customer commitments, and long-term product supportability.
The Sustainment Project Manager does not simply track work. This role drives accountability across functions, identifies blockers early, escalates risks before they impact the fleet or customer, and ensures leadership has clear visibility into sustainment health, open risks, aging issues, and priority actions.
What you'll do:
Own and maintain the V-BAT sustainment action tracker, ensuring actions, owners, due dates, blockers, decisions, and status are accurate and current.
Drive the weekly sustainment review rhythm, including agenda management, action follow-up, decision tracking, and escalation preparation.
Lead sustainment escalation reviews for aging, blocked, customer-impacting, or fleet-readiness-impacting issues.
Coordinate across Fleet Support, Sustainment Engineering, Product Engineering, Quality, Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Customer Success, and Operations to align ownership, priority, and execution path.
Maintain clear visibility into top customer-impacting and fleet-impacting sustainment issues.
Drive progress on corrective actions, obsolescence actions, configuration changes, maintenance releases, service actions, and field support actions.
Ensure major sustainment actions have assigned owners, committed dates, defined next steps, and clear closure criteria.
Identify risks, blockers, dependencies, and resource constraints that may delay sustainment execution or impact customer support.
Escalate blocked or aging actions with clear recommendations, decision needs, and impact statements.
Support maintenance release coordination, release readiness reviews, and field rollout planning.
Partner with technical teams to ensure configuration changes, service actions, and corrective actions are coordinated with appropriate stakeholders before field execution.
Prepare leadership updates on sustainment status, priority risks, customer impacts, aging actions, and execution health.
Translate complex technical and operational issues into clear action plans, decision points, and executive-level summaries.
Improve sustainment operating mechanisms, trackers, review formats, escalation paths, and reporting structure as the sustainment function scales.
Drive accountability without direct authority by aligning stakeholders around priorities, timelines, and customer or fleet impact.
Required qualifications:
6+ years of experience in technical project management, technical program management, engineering operations, sustainment, aviation operations, manufacturing operations, product support, or complex hardware execution.
Demonstrated experience driving cross-functional technical work across engineering, quality, manufacturing, supply chain, operations, customer support, or field support teams.
Experience managing or coordinating corrective actions, configuration changes, obsolescence actions, service actions, production issues, field issues, or fleet-impacting sustainment actions.
Strong technical fluency with hardware products, engineering change processes, configuration management, root cause/corrective action processes, manufacturing processes, aviation maintenance, or fielded system support.
Proven ability to build and manage action trackers, escalation mechanisms, risk registers, dependency maps, decision logs, and leadership reporting.
Strong ability to identify blockers, drive accountability, escalate risks, and maintain execution cadence without direct authority over functional teams.
Experience supporting customer-impacting technical issues in a high-reliability hardware, aerospace, defense, robotics, aviation, manufacturing, or similarly complex operational environment.
Ability to communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, including engineers, operators, support teams, manufacturing teams, quality teams, and senior leaders.
Strong written communication skills, including the ability to convert technical details into concise status updates, risk summaries, decision requests, and executive briefings.
Ability to operate independently in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and impose structure where processes are immature, evolving, or cross-functionally complex.
Strong judgment in prioritizing issues based on customer impact, fleet readiness, operational risk, technical severity, and execution urgency.
Preferred qualifications:
Experience with UAS, aviation sustainment, aerospace manufacturing, defense programs, fielded hardware systems, or deployed technical products.
Familiarity with MRB, FRACAS, RCCA, ECO/ECR processes, configuration management, fleet readiness, service bulletins, maintenance releases, or field retrofit execution.
Experience working with deployed systems, field operations, customer support teams, military customers, or defense end users.
Experience supporting sustainment, reliability, maintainability, or lifecycle support for complex electromechanical systems.
Experience working in a startup, high-growth, defense technology, aerospace, or advanced manufacturing environment.
PMP, Lean Six Sigma, APICS, aviation maintenance, engineering operations, or related certification preferred but not required.
