Customer Delivery Manager
Loft Orbital · San Francisco, CA ·
- Work mode
- Onsite
- Employment
- Full time
- Category
- Project management
- Experience
- 3+ years
- Company size
- 51-200
Coordinate end-to-end satellite missions for customers, aligning engineering, product, and ops to deliver on-orbit capabilities on schedule.
Loft Orbital's mission is to make space simple. We deploy customer missions on our satellite infrastructure so our customers can focus on their applications instead of the spacecraft underneath them. The Customer Delivery team turns signed contracts into working missions on orbit and supports our customers from start to finish.
As a Technical Program Manager, Customer Delivery, you maintain the engine that drives the Customer Delivery team forward. You connect Loft's product development efforts to our customer value stream, ensuring the team has the right capabilities, tools, and plans to execute customer missions. You will work alongside our Customer Delivery Engineers (CDEs), who design and execute each customer mission, by building the development plans and capability portfolio they draw on to deliver value to our customers. You will own Mission Development Plans that coordinate work across engineering, product, and operations teams; manage the Customer Offering Portfolio that defines what Loft can deliver; and drive quality, visibility, and consistency in how new capabilities are deployed to our customer offering. This role is well suited to someone who has taken products from development through deployment at a product-driven technology company and wants to apply that discipline iteratively across an active product line of missions flying in orbit.
About this role:
- Own the Mission Development Plan for assigned missions: identify all work required to deploy and execute the mission, break it down into committed work packages with contributing teams, and drive it to completion against launch-anchored deadlines
- Manage the Customer Offering Portfolio: maintain the catalog of capabilities Loft can draw on to execute customer missions, identify deltas between the portfolio and upcoming mission needs, and drive new capability development with product and engineering teams
- Partner with Customer Delivery Engineers to deliver customer value: CDEs execute the mission with the customer, and you ensure the capabilities, plans, and tooling they need are in place when they need them
- Connect Customer Delivery to Loft's product organization by representing operational and customer constraints in product planning, and by managing the deployment of new features and capabilities into operational use
- Drive cross-functional coordination and status clarity: run internal reviews with CDEs, report on development progress, risks, and blockers, and keep leadership and customers aligned on where things stand
- Engage directly with customers, up to the executive level, on mission development scope, schedule, and capability tradeoffs
- Continuously improve Customer Delivery processes, templates, and workflows to increase execution efficiency without sacrificing quality
Must Haves:
- ~8 years of professional experience in technical program, product, or engineering roles
- ~3 years as an Engineering Program Manager (EPM) or Product-focused Technical Program Manager (TPM) at a product-driven technology company, leading cross-functional programs from definition through ship
- Experience deploying products into production or operational environments, including release readiness, cross-team dependency management, and post-deployment quality
- Experience in the satellite or aerospace industry, with working knowledge of spacecraft systems, mission operations, or payload development
- Experience working directly with external customers, including executive-level stakeholders
- Exceptional and proven technical aptitude: able to go deep with engineers on architecture and tradeoffs, and translate that fluently for customers and executives
- Excellent communication skills at all levels, from engineering deep dives to executive summaries, with the organization and prioritization skills to run multiple parallel workstreams in a fast-paced environment
Nice to Haves:
- Direct experience with satellite on-orbit operations, commissioning, or ground segment software
- Technical leadership experience (leading engineers or technical teams, formally or informally)
- Experience building or managing a product/capability portfolio, roadmap, or plan of record
- Experience with international customers and distributed teams
Some of Our Awesome Benefits:
- 100% company-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance option for employees and dependents
- Flexible Spending (FSA) and Health Savings (HSA) Accounts offered with an employer contribution to the HSA
- 100% employer paid Life, AD&D, Short-Term, and Long-Term Disability insurance
- Flexible Time Off policy for vacation and sick leave, and 12 paid holidays
- 401(k) plan and equity options
- Daily catered lunches and snacks in office
- International exposure to our team in France
- Fully paid parental leave; 14 weeks for birthing parent and 10 weeks for non-birthing parent
- Carrot Fertility provides comprehensive, inclusive fertility healthcare and family-forming benefits with financial support
- Off-sites and many social events and celebrations
- Relocation assistance when applicable