Business Strategy & Operations Lead

Responsibilities:

• Serve as the implementation arm for newly approved operational processes: write clear, usable process documentation, design and run the training and rollout plan, and own the post-implementation adoption review. 
• Own operational projects end-to-end — from problem definition through solutioning and implementation to a clean transition of ownership — coordinating finance, procurement, IT, facilities, and HR to deliver company-wide operational projects that don't sit cleanly inside a single engineering program. 
• Own headcount planning and demand/supply forecasting for business-operations functions, building the tooling and processes that support efficient resource allocation as Xcimer scales. 
• Define and evolve Xcimer's operational knowledge-management and information architecture (e.g., Confluence or similar), driving adoption and content hygiene across departments. 
• Maintain a prioritized backlog of identified-but-unresourced operational process gaps across the company and recommend sequencing and resourcing to close them. 
• Partner with other departments to map end-to-end business data workflows (e.g., Teamcenter, Boltline, ERP) and drive resolution of cross-team data and process gaps. 
• Work with the Chief of Staff to translate decisions and action items from executive offsites and business reviews into resourced initiatives with clear owners, timelines, and follow-through. 
• Identify, evaluate, and help mitigate operational risks and single points of failure across business operations functions. 
• Partner with Finance to build and maintain the program-level economic models that connect technical and schedule decisions to long-run plant economics, capital requirements, and investment tradeoffs — feeding the assumptions Finance uses in its capital-markets and fundraising models — to support program prioritization and make/buy decisions. 
• Partner with the Head of PMO to represent business-operations capacity and constraints (finance, procurement, IT, facilities, data systems) in program planning, ensuring program schedules are built against realistic support-function resourcing. 
• Project-manage across large, cross-functional stakeholder groups: lead working sessions, wrangle multiple threads at once, and report progress up to executive stakeholders without dropping the ball. 
• Prepare analysis and materials to support budget reviews, board updates, and investor reporting as requested by the COO. 

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in business, engineering, operations, or a related field; MBA or equivalent experience a plus. 
• 5+ years of experience in strategy, business operations, program management, or management consulting, ideally supporting a hardware, deep-tech, or complex engineering organization. 
• Demonstrated experience designing and rolling out operational processes end-to-end — including training and post-implementation follow-through — in a fast-growing or resource-constrained organization. 
• Demonstrated experience with headcount planning, demand/supply forecasting, or workforce modeling in a scaling organization. 
• Experience supporting facilities or space planning, ideally across multiple sites. 
• Strong analytical and financial modeling skills, with comfort building quantitative models that connect technical or program decisions to business and economic outcomes. 
• High ownership and low ego, with a bias toward proactively stepping into ambiguous, cross-functional problems rather than waiting to be assigned one. 
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to work effectively — and lead meetings — across engineering, finance, procurement, IT, and executive stakeholders. 
• Must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee of granted asylum 

Desired:

• Experience in fusion, aerospace, defense, or other capital-intensive hardware development environments. 
• Familiarity with PLM/ERP and business data systems (e.g., Teamcenter, Boltline, or similar) and the challenges of integrating data across them. 
• Experience administering or architecting Confluence or a similar knowledge-management platform at scale. 
• Experience with BI/analytics platforms such as Looker, Tableau, or similar. 
• Experience establishing or scaling a PMO, or working closely alongside one, in a matrixed engineering organization. 
• Project Management Professional (PMP) or similar certification.