Director of Quality Assurance

ABOUT FIREFLY AEROSPACE

As an end-to-end space transportation company, Firefly Aerospace is on a mission to enable our world to launch, land, and operate in space – anywhere, anytime. Our launch vehicles, lunar landers, and orbital vehicles provide government and commercial customers with full mission services from low Earth orbit to the surface of the Moon and beyond. Headquartered in north Austin, Texas, Firefly is looking for passionate, hardworking innovators to join our team and help fuel our successful trajectory into space.

About the Role

Quality Assurance owns the processes and tools by which Firefly identifies, contains, eliminates, and prevents non-conformances. Quality is charged with defining and maintaining the processes and tools which prove product capabilities meet requirements and result in a predictably economical and reliable product.

We are seeking an experienced Director of Quality Assurance to lead our efforts in ensuring the reliability, economy, and performance of our products and services. This role is crucial in driving the strategic vision for reliability across the organization and managing a team of engineers and inspectors focused on proactive quality controls, risk management, process repeatability, and operational resilience. This position is located at our Production and Test facility north of Austin, in Briggs, TX.

What You’ll Do

• Lead the Quality Assurance team in developing and implementing reliability strategies across the entire product lifecycle, from design to manufacturing, assembly, and deployment.
• Lead and mentor a team of engineers and inspectors to achieve technical excellence and career development.
• Collaborate with senior leadership to integrate quality and reliability as core aspects of the company’s engineering and operations culture.
• Establish and enforce reliability standards, policies, and procedures throughout the organization.
• Guide the evolution and ensure that the Quality Management System (QMS) conforms to the requirements of AS9100, maintaining QMS integrity as changes are planned and implemented
• Lead cross-functional investigations to resolve quality issues identifying and mitigating the immediate and underlying root causes in order to reduce risk and improve reliability of designs and processes.
• Ensure scalability and resilience in product design and process introduction through strategic input at the early stages of development.
• Work cross-functionally with engineering, supply chain, operations, and launch/mission operations teams to drive improvements in system reliability.
• Ensure adequate and efficient coverage of quality support to all operational areas; ensure quality engineering and inspection skills are adequately defined and developed.
• Drive initiatives for process optimization and efficiency to reduce defects and improve overall product quality.
• Establish and drive reliability metrics and quality assurance standards for launch vehicles and spacecraft systems; ensuring all products and services meet industry requirements and company goals.
• Maintain a feedback loop to drive hardware inputs that enable reliable and rapid operations cadence; using data to make the quality landscape transparent and drive prioritization of resolving high impact issues.