Programme Lead

Bliksem Exo is a four-nation European consortium developing an anti-ballistic missile system under critical time pressure. Destinus is the programme prime, and responsible for the exo-atmospheric interceptor. You will be part of a specialized team to build and improve this vehicle, which is engineered for affordability and production at scale and needs to be developed at operational pace.

You will run the engine room of a four-nation programme. Destinus is prime across a consortium of large industrial partners and national stakeholders, with a small, senior engineering team at the centre. Technical direction sits with the programme's technical leadership; your job is to make the programme run: schedule, budget, risk, actions, document control, and the operating rhythm across partners.

This is a delivery role: the consortium runs on a joint technical board, structured work-package reviews, and interface agreements between partners in four countries. Someone has to own that machinery, keep every action tracked to closure, and make sure nothing is decided in the gaps between meetings. That someone is you.

A substantial part of the job is the administration that a multi-national defence programme generates: security procedures, export-control and releasability handling, and information management between partners with different national constraints. We are explicitly looking for someone who has done this before and is good at it.

What you will do

• Own the programme plan. Build and maintain the integrated schedule across internal work and partner work packages, track critical paths and dependencies, and keep the plan realistic.

• Run the operating rhythm. Organise and drive the joint technical board, work-package reviews, partner bilaterals, and internal cadence: agendas, minutes, decisions logged, actions tracked to closure.

• Own budget and cost tracking for the programme phase, including partner deliverable milestones, and give the programme leadership an accurate picture at all times.

• Own the risk and issue register, ensure every risk has an owner and a mitigation, and escalate the ones that need a decision.

• Run export-control, security, and releasability administration. Manage classified and export-controlled information flows between partners in four nations, own the document-control and information-management system, and keep the engineering team out of that overhead.

• Manage partner coordination logistics: deliverable tracking, data-exchange scheduling, review preparation.

• Support governmental and customer-facing milestones with programme status, documentation, and reporting, in support of the Technical Programme Lead.

Requirements

• 10+ years of programme or project management in defence, aerospace, or another regulated, safety-critical industry.

• Hands-on experience administering export-controlled and/or classified programmes: releasability decisions, information-control procedures, and the discipline that goes with them.

• Experience running multi-party programmes. Consortia, prime/sub structures, or international collaborations where the parties do not share a management chain.

• Demonstrated command of the core toolkit: integrated scheduling, budget and milestone tracking, risk management, action tracking, and document control, all of which you can set up from scratch.

• Enough technical literacy to follow an engineering review, capture its decisions accurately, and know when an action is genuinely closed.

• Fluent professional English; Other languages relevant to the consortium, like French, German, Dutch are a plus.

Highly desirable

• Experience on missile, or other government-customer defence programmes with formal review gates.

• Experience standing up programme infrastructure on a new or early-phase programme, rather than inheriting a running one.