Head of Information Technology at Castelion in Torrance, CA

Job description

Why Castelion, Why Now Castelion is moving incredibly fast to develop and deliver advanced defense systems at a time when execution matters more than ever. We believe focus, ownership, and excellence are decisive advantages - and we're building a world-class team to turn bold ideas into real capability. This is a rare opportunity to join at an early stage, where you'll have significant ownership, collaborate with exceptional teammates, and make a direct, measurable impact on our mission and the future of the company - regardless of your function. Head of Information Technology Castelion is building affordable hypersonic weapons at the speed and scale required to restore American deterrence. Achieving this requires exceptional engineering, rapid testing, and manufacturing capacity—all supported by secure, reliable IT infrastructure that can keep pace with the business. The Head of Information Technology will own Castelion’s IT strategy, infrastructure, and execution across all locations. This leader will build and scale a high-performing organization while maintaining the technical depth to personally solve the company’s most difficult infrastructure challenges. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone equally capable of troubleshooting a critical outage, challenging a network architecture, recruiting exceptional technical leaders, and making high-impact investment decisions. The successful candidate combines exceptional technical judgment with a relentless bias toward action, high standards, and accountability for results. Responsibilities Build and lead an exceptional IT organization. Recruit, develop, and retain outstanding talent across infrastructure, networking, systems, cybersecurity, and end-user support. Establish clear ownership, develop strong technical leaders, and maintain a high bar for performance and execution. Maintain deep technical ownership. Design systems, review configurations, write automation, and troubleshoot complex failures alongside the team. Personally engage when critical problems demand your expertise and ensure solutions are technically sound and operationally durable. Scale infrastructure across multiple sites. Deliver the connectivity, compute, storage, endpoints, and support required to bring new engineering facilities, manufacturing operations, and test locations online. Own deployment, commissioning, and operational readiness against aggressive program schedules. Ensure reliability and operational readiness. Build resilient infrastructure, effective monitoring, tested disaster recovery, and disciplined incident response. Resolve recurring issues at their root cause and minimize downtime across critical business operations. Accelerate engineering, manufacturing, and test. Partner directly with engineering, manufacturing, flight test, and business leaders to understand operational requirements and eliminate infrastructure bottlenecks. Treat lost engineering productivity and interrupted production as problems to solve with urgency. Automate and standardize aggressively. Build repeatable processes for provisioning, identity and access management, configuration, patching, monitoring, and recovery. Use automation and sound architecture to improve reliability while increasing the organization’s capacity to support growth. Implement practical, effective security. Lead IT security implementation across access controls, network segmentation, endpoint hardening, logging, vulnerability management, and protection of sensitive information. Build secure systems and workflows that enable speed without compromising required controls. Own technology strategy and resource allocation. Manage budgets, vendors, capacity planning, and technology investments. Make sound build-versus-buy decisions, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and ensure resources deliver measurable operational value. Establish accountability and continuous improvement. Define meaningful service and reliability metrics, set clear expectation