Senior Technical Program Manager, Pilot Manufacturing and New Customer Onboarding

We're seeking an experienced Sr. Technical Program Manager to lead the onboarding and stabilization of new internal customers into our manufacturing organization. This role sits at the intersection of engineering, manufacturing operations, supply chain, and quality — driving the full lifecycle from initial customer engagement through pilot production, process validation, and steady-state handoff. You will own the end-to-end program for bringing new products and programs into our manufacturing facility, building repeatable onboarding frameworks that scale as our customer base grows. This is a unique opportunity to shape how a growing internal manufacturing organization operates — establishing the mechanisms, processes, and cross-functional coordination that turn first-article builds into reliable production lines. Key job responsibilities - Own the new customer onboarding lifecycle: from initial scoping and requirements gathering through pilot builds, process validation, acceptance testing, and transition to steady-state production - Define and manage the pilot manufacturing program (mission, vision, tenets, success criteria) with clear milestones, owners, and exit criteria for each onboarding phase - Translate ambiguous product requirements and engineering designs into structured manufacturing readiness plans — identifying tooling, fixturing, process, staffing, and facility needs before production starts - Drive cross-functional alignment between product engineering, manufacturing engineering, quality, supply chain, warehouse, and operations teams to ensure critical paths are identified and tackled effectively - Build and own the onboarding playbook: standardized gates, checklists, and readiness reviews (Design for Manufacturing reviews, First Article Inspections, Process Failure Mode and Effects Analysis, production trial runs) that each new program passes through - Identify risks and dependencies early — including supply chain readiness, BOM maturity, tooling lead times, workforce training gaps, and facility constraints — escalate with data, and drive resolution before they become roadblocks - Build and maintain mechanisms (reviews, dashboards, status cadences, clear-to-build tracking) that give leadership visibility into onboarding pipeline health without creating drag on production teams - Manage the manufacturing roadmap in partnership with engineering and operations leadership: sequence new program onboards against facility capacity, workforce availability, and existing production commitments - Drive continuous improvement of the onboarding process itself — capture lessons learned from each pilot, quantify cycle time and first-pass yield metrics, and implement changes that reduce time-to-stable-production for subsequent customers - Coordinate across organizations to unblock teams, resolve competing priorities between active production and new program introduction, and negotiate tradeoffs (time vs. quality vs. scope) - Partner with quality engineering to ensure new programs meet acceptance criteria and that manufacturing processes are validated (PPAP, APQP, or equivalent frameworks) before volume ramp - Oversee gaps between teams, processes, and systems — proactively reduce exposure to classic failure modes: requirements not sufficiently understood, ineffective cross-team collaboration, insufficient testing, unclear ownership boundaries between customer engineering and manufacturing - Write effective narratives and present program status, risks, and tradeoff recommendations to Directors and VPs - Mentor and develop junior TPMs and cross-functional team members; provide constructive feedback across engineering, manufacturing, and program management disciplines