Manufacturing Program Manager

About us

Final Frontier Manufacturing is an AS9100D-certified, ITAR-registered precision machining company building flight- and mission-critical parts for the aerospace and defense primes. We're AI-native down to the shop floor — we run modern AI tooling across quoting, inspection, NC program review, and the full order-to-cash flow — and we pair startup speed with zero-defect aerospace discipline. We're about 35 people and 15 spindles today, scaling hard into a new facility footprint on the I-25 corridor in early 2027.

The role

We're hiring a Program Manager to own the thing that actually matters in contract manufacturing: getting conforming parts out the door, on time, at the price we quoted. Every time.

This is not a Gantt-chart project-management job, and it's not an expeditor job. You own the thread that runs through a contract from the moment a PO lands to the moment it ships. You don't machine the part, write the process plan, or run the schedule yourself — engineering, production, and quality own those. You own the outcome, and you make sure every one of those functions does its part on time and in sequence. The defining feature of the role is accountability without direct authority: you get things delivered through influence, follow-through, sharp prioritization, and well-timed escalation — not because anyone reports to you.

What you'd own

• Contract review and order entry. Validate that what we sold is what we can build — revision, quantities, dates, terms, and all customer flowdowns — and get it entered cleanly. Catch the problems before they're on the floor.
• Material and outside-process procurement. Place and expedite raw material and outside-process POs, track them in, and capture the documentation. Our buying requirements are defined and our supply base is mature, with strong tooling behind it — this is a task inside your loop, not a separate full-time job.
• Planning oversight. Hold engineering to process-planning turnaround and hold production to a schedule that meets the customer's date with margin. Spot the long-lead material and outside-process steps early and get ahead of them.
• Status and escalation. Be the single source of truth on where every active order stands. Tell signal from noise, resolve what you can, and escalate the rest to the right person with the right framing — early enough that it never becomes a schedule problem.
• Customer and vendor communication. Be the calm, partnership-minded face of execution. When there's a constraint, you frame it as "here's how we solve this together," never as an ultimatum — and you share the credit when it goes right.

You're the right person if you

• Have a track record of getting hard things delivered across teams you didn't manage — by influence, organization, and knowing exactly when to raise your hand
• Can read an engineering drawing today and are hungry to get genuinely fluent in GD&T, process flow, and special processes (you won't be doing the engineering — but you need to know enough to interrogate the work and never get snowed)
• Stay organized and level-headed with a dozen open threads, and have good instincts for which one is about to catch fire
• Communicate cleanly in writing and in the room, with customers and vendors as well as internally
• Trust a system of record over a spreadsheet and your own memory — and want to help build and document the playbook, because we're growing this into a multi-PM, customer-pod structure and you'd be helping define how it runs

Nice to have

• Aerospace or defense contract-manufacturing experience (AS9100, first-article/AS9102, customer flowdowns, ITAR awareness)
• Prior procurement, expediting, or production-control experience
• Experience turning a process you personally ran into one someone else could pick up and run

Logistics

• US Person status required (ITAR). On-site in Arvada, CO. This is a build-it role on a steep ramp — if you want a seat where execution moves the whole company, we should talk.