Director of Sustainment Engineering (Drones)

Location: Torrance, California, USA; onsite work involving indoor and outdoor facilities, inspections, maintenance walk-throughs, and occasional off-hours or weekend facility responses.

Salary: $158,240–$247,250 per year, plus annual equity and potential bonuses.

Company

hirify.global develops and supports drone platforms and related unmanned systems.

What you will do

• Own the engineering strategy and roadmap for sustaining fielded drone systems, including airframes, propulsion, avionics, payloads, and ground control systems.
• Build, lead, and mentor a multidisciplinary sustainment engineering team covering reliability, field and product support, obsolescence, and configuration engineering.
• Lead root-cause and corrective-action investigations for field failures, anomalies, and in-service issues, driving closed-loop corrective and preventive actions.
• Translate field data into design improvements, engineering change orders, product upgrades, and reliability, maintainability, and availability improvements.
• Direct technical manuals, maintenance procedures, repair programs, training materials, depot-level and field-level support, and customer sustainment reviews.
• Manage sustainment budgets, staffing, departmental goals, lifecycle cost reduction, compliance, fleet-health reporting, and proposal support.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Aerospace, Mechanical, Electrical, or a related engineering discipline. A master’s degree is preferred.
• 10+ years of engineering experience in aerospace, defense, or unmanned systems, including 5+ years in sustainment, reliability, product support, or in-service engineering.
• 3+ years of people leadership experience managing engineers and cross-functional teams.
• Experience with root-cause analysis methodologies such as 8D, Fishbone/Ishikawa, FRACAS, and FMEA.
• Working knowledge of reliability engineering principles, RM&A metrics, and lifecycle sustainment planning.
• Experience with configuration management and engineering change processes in a regulated manufacturing environment.
• Familiarity with unmanned aircraft systems, avionics, or small-UAS platforms.
• Strong communication skills for representing engineering to customers, program management, and executive leadership.
• U.S. Person status is required due to ITAR restrictions.
• Ability to walk, stand, navigate large indoor and outdoor facilities, lift and move materials weighing up to 25 pounds, and use required PPE. The role may involve climbing, crouching, exposure to noise, dust, temperature fluctuations, and industrial equipment.

Nice to have

• Experience supporting fielded military or government UAS/drone programs through their full lifecycle.
• Familiarity with MIL-STD reliability and maintainability standards, including MIL-STD-1629A and MIL-HDBK-217, and airworthiness sustainment requirements.
• Experience establishing or scaling a sustainment or product support engineering function.
• Six Sigma, Lean, or reliability engineering certification such as CRE.

Culture & Benefits

• Annual equity package and potential bonuses.
• Work includes coordination across design engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, operations, customer support, and executive leadership.
• Occasional off-hours or weekend work may be required for emergency facility responses or projects.
• Post-offer background check required; candidates with criminal history are considered consistent with federal and state law.
• Employment eligibility is verified through E-Verify, and ITAR/EAR-controlled work requires proof of U.S. citizenship or permanent residence without sponsorship for export-restricted work authorization.