Deployment Operations Manager

Costa Mesa, CA

Full Time

Experienced

Type: Direct hire, full-time · Base: $112,000–$149,000 + equity · Clearance: Must be eligible for a U.S. Secret clearance · Travel: Required

VDS is recruiting a Product Operations Manager to keep a fleet of autonomous underwater and maritime systems ready for the mission. You will lead the team that responds when fielded systems fail and turn those lessons into engineering fixes.

What you'll do

• Lead the incident-response team for deployed maritime systems.
• Turn field failures into clear design-change requests for engineering.
• Use fleet health data to spot failures before they happen.
• Serve as the link between engineering, business development and naval end users.
• Standardize sustainment and support processes across the fleet.

What you bring

• 6+ years supporting complex technical systems, including team leadership.
• A technical bachelor's degree, or equivalent military, maritime or industrial experience.
• Comfort working from logs, dashboards and support tickets to a root cause.

Nice to have

• Unmanned underwater vehicle or munitions deployment experience, or a naval background.
• Linux, Grafana, Jira, Git, and SQL or Palantir Foundry.

Product Operations Manager, Mission Success

Type: Direct hire, full-time · Base: $113,000–$149,000 + equity · Clearance: Must be eligible for a U.S. Secret clearance (active clearance a plus) · Travel: Field travel required

VDS is recruiting a Product Operations Manager to keep fielded defense systems available across several product lines. The role spans autonomy software, networking and hardware integration, and you will be the person who finds out why something broke.

What you'll do

• Keep deployed systems mission-ready and lead customer-facing incident response.
• Diagnose root causes from logs and the Linux command line.
• Improve system monitoring and health data.
• Analyze failure trends and drive fixes with engineering.
• Travel to customer sites when issues need hands-on work.

What you bring

• 6+ years in a technical operations, reliability or field-support role.
• A bachelor's degree; a STEM degree or MBA is preferred.
• Independence across hardware, software and networking problems.

Nice to have

• Defense, special operations or military experience.
• On-call or site-reliability background, data analysis, Grafana and Git.