Director Production Engineering (m/f/d)

<p><strong>Mission Brief </strong></p> <p>As Director of Production Engineering, you are accountable for the end-to-end production engineering capability across all manufacturing operations. Your mission is to industrialize development outputs into repeatable, scalable, and compliant serial production, ensuring manufacturing readiness, process stability, quality, cost efficiency, and on-time delivery. You lead the team that converts early procedures into robust production standards, embeds them in PLM/MES systems, and drives continuous improvement across the factory.</p> <p>You act as the primary interface between Engineering (design & development) and Manufacturing (production & operations)—ensuring requirements, procedures, tooling, documentation, test strategies, and digital manufacturing infrastructure are aligned for high-rate, high-quality execution. </p> <p>Your Role in Our Space Mission: </p> <p><strong>1) Production engineering strategy & leadership</strong></p> <ul> <li>Define and execute the production engineering roadmap, including industrialization strategy, standardization, and scalability for serial production.</li> <li>Lead and develop a team of production/process/manufacturing engineers; set goals, coaching plans, hiring needs, and performance standards.</li> <li>Establish clear governance for process ownership, engineering change implementation, and cross-functional decision-making.</li> </ul> <p><strong>2) Assembly, integration & test (AIT) process ownership</strong></p> <ul> <li>Own manufacturing process definition across:</li> <ul> <li>Assembly: mechanical/electrical build procedures, torque specs, critical process parameters, work instructions.</li> <li>Integration: subsystem integration strategy (e.g., avionics, propulsion, communications), sequencing, interfaces, and acceptance criteria.</li> <li>Testing: functional, subsystem, and system-level test strategy; test readiness, execution plans, and troubleshooting methodology.</li> </ul> <li>Ensure processes are repeatable, auditable, and optimized for safety, throughput, and quality.</li> </ul> <p><strong>3) Industrialization & manufacturing readiness (NPI / transfer to production)</strong></p> <ul> <li>Coordinate with development teams to receive initial procedures and convert them into production-ready standards (control plans, critical-to-quality characteristics where relevant).</li> <li>Drive manufacturing readiness reviews, line readiness, and process qualification for new products, variants, or upgrades.</li> <li>Lead the “first builds”/pilot runs, capturing learnings and stabilizing procedures for volume exe