Space Systems Government Contracts Project Manager

Socket.dev; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Paid holidays

Paid time off

Competitive salary

Job summary

E-Space is hiring a government contracts program manager in Santa Clara, CA. This full-time, on-site role manages the integrated master schedule across space, ground, and payload workstreams and owns contract deliverables end to end, including reviews and customer acceptance.

You will work daily with systems, spacecraft, and ground engineers, maintaining the risk register and coordinating with contracts, finance, export compliance, and security to ensure compliance and successful program

Qualifications

• 5+ years managing government programs in aerospace, defense, or a comparable regulated environment.
• Direct experience executing against government agreements — OTAs, FAR/DFARS-based contracts, SBIR/STTR, or task order vehicles.
• Track record carrying a single program through a full lifecycle.
• Track record building and maintaining an integrated master schedule that engineering actually uses.
• Experience as a customer-facing program point of contact, including running formal reviews with real entry/exit criteria, action tracking, and closure.
• Demonstrated ability to deliver in a matrix organization, holding a program together when the engineers doing the work report through a different chain.
• Working knowledge of systems engineering practice: requirements flow-down, verification and validation planning, interface management.
• Comfort in a fast-moving environment where the plan changes weekly and the project manager is the one keeping it coherent.
• Clear, direct communication up and down: engineers get context, leadership and the customer get truth.
• US person status, and eligibility to obtain and maintain a US Government security clearance

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.
• 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 elevate 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.

Skills

Program management

Government contracts

Single-program focus

Integrated master schedule

Customer-facing

Matrix organization

Systems engineering basics

Fast-paced environment

Clear communication

US person status

Job description

E-Space is hiring a government contracts program manager in Santa Clara, CA. This full-time, on-site role manages the integrated master schedule across space, ground, and payload workstreams and owns contract deliverables end to end, including reviews and customer acceptance.

You will work daily with systems, spacecraft, and ground engineers, maintaining the risk register and coordinating with contracts, finance, export compliance, and security to ensure compliance and successful program