Project Manager, Government Contracts at E-Space in Santa Clara, CA

Job description

Ready to make connectivity from space universally accessible, secure and actionable? Then you’ve come to the right place! E-Space is bridging Earth and space to enable hyper-scaled deployments of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions and services. We are building a highly-advanced low Earth orbit (LEO) space system that will fundamentally change the design, economics, manufacturing and service delivery associated with traditional satellite and terrestrial IoT systems. We’re intentional, we’re unapologetically curious and we’re 100% committed to innovate space-based communications and deliver actionable intelligence that will expand global economies, protect space and our planet and enhance our overall quality of life. The Government Contracts team executes E-Space's US Government portfolio: the contracts, the customer relationships, and the delivery of the programs themselves. We are staffing dedicated project management to each of our five flagship programs. This role is assigned to one of them — with scope that may extend across a related capability area such as ground-based radar, space-based radar, or SIGINT and communications — and owns its execution day to day. The work is integrative by nature: a schedule slip in one subsystem becomes a deliverable problem, a funding problem, and a customer conversation within the same week. We are looking for a project manager who can hold all three at once, on one program, with real depth rather than spread across many. This role reports to the Program Manager, Government Contracts, who owns the portfolio and the overall customer relationship. You own your program. This position will be based out of our Santa Clara, CA or Arlington, TX location. Key Responsibilities: • Own the integrated master schedule for your program across space, ground, and payload workstreams • Own contract deliverables end to end — CDRLs, milestone submittals, technical reports: the deliverable list, the schedule behind it, review and submittal, and customer acceptance • Serve as the day-to-day programmatic point of contact for the government customer on your program: cost and schedule status, deliverable status, contractual actions, and the informal calls in between. Technical authority sits with the mission systems engineer • Track cost and schedule performance against the award: burn rate versus funding, milestone payment triggers, and early warning when the two diverge • Maintain the risk register and drive mitigations to closure • Run the gated review lifecycle — SRR, PDR, CDR, and other milestone and program reviews — owning entry/exit criteria, logistics, action tracking, and closure, while engineering owns the technical content presented • Partner with the mission systems engineer assigned to your program, who reports through the Chief Systems Engineer or project chief engineer. They own the technical baseline; you own the plan and the commitment • Pull on the functional organization to get your program the engineering it needs, and escalate cleanly when priorities collide across the portfolio • Work across contracts, finance, export compliance, and security to keep the program compliant • Contribute schedules, basis of estimate inputs, and technical volume content to follow-on scope and task orders on your program You will work daily with systems, spacecraft, and ground engineers, and directly with your government program office. You need enough technical depth to challenge an estimate, recognize a risk before it shows up in a status report, and hold a credible programmatic conversation with a customer without an engineer in the room. You do not need to design the system or own the technical answer, but you need to understand what the engineers are telling you and notice when the technical reality and the contractual commitment have quietly drifted apart. Required Qualifications: • 5+ years managing government programs in aerospace, defense, or a comparable regulated environment • Direct experience execut