Technical Project Manager

**Technical Project Manager**:
**Airborne Optical Systems**:
**Burlington ON**:
**About the Role**:
At PVLabs, Project Managers don't just manage schedules—they turn technical ambition into delivered reality.

You will operate at the center of a highly multidisciplinary organization, aligning Engineering Labs (Electrical, Mechanical, Software, Gateware, Systems), Operations, Leadership, and Customers around a shared execution plan. Your primary job is not task tracking—it is outcome ownership: clarifying priorities, managing risk, sequencing interdependencies, and driving decisions in complex, fast-moving environments.

This is a senior role for someone who thrives in ambiguity, brings technical credibility, and leads through influence rather than authority. You'll guide programs from early uncertainty through execution, balancing long-term system milestones with short-term tradeoffs in design, supply chain, and resourcing.

As PVLabs evolves from a custom-engineering model to a product-centric innovation company, you'll help shape how programs are planned, governed, and scaled across a growing portfolio of airborne ISR systems.

**Your Center of Gravity: The PVLabs Engineering Council**:
You will work closely with the PVLabs Engineering Council—a small group of Staff and Principal Engineers spanning all engineering disciplines.

Rather than micromanaging tasks, youll rely on this group as a force multiplier: translating program priorities into executable engineering work, surfacing technical risk early, and sequencing interdependent deliverables. Your success depends on strong relationships, shared context, and mutual trust—combining your program-level ownership with their deep technical leadership.

**What You Will be Responsible For**:
**Program Ownership & Execution**:

- Own cost, schedule, risk, and performance across complex technical programs from kickoff through delivery
- Develop and maintain integrated master schedules, technical baselines, and risk frameworks
- Balance engineering ambition with production realities, supply chain constraints, and resourcing limits
- Cross-Functional Leadership
- Align Electrical, Mechanical, Software, Optics, and Gateware workstreams
- Translate complex technical data into decision-ready insight for leadership and customers
- Manage stakeholder communication with clarity, urgency, and judgment
- Decision & Dependency Management
- Sequence and deconflict interdependent deliverables across disciplines
- Anticipate downstream impacts and resolve issues before they escalate
- Drive tradeoff decisions grounded in realism and system-level thinking
- Process & Scale Enablement
- Help shape PVLabs ERP-integrated project management approach, including resource modeling, material planning, and NRE forecasting
- Contribute to how we plan, track, and communicate work as the organization scales

**What You're About**:
We value how people work as much as what they deliver. You are someone who:

- Sees both the big picture and the work-package detail
- Leads through credibility, diplomacy, and clarity rather than authority
- Is energized by complex, fast-moving technical environments
- Brings order to ambiguity through structured thinking and decisive action
- Thinks systemically across electro-mechanical-optical products
- Communicates confidently without ego—and know when to ask questions
- Is comfortable navigating tension, tradeoffs, and competing priorities
- Has worked where documentation, plans, and products evolve together

**Your Background**:
This role is intentionally not suited to generic project management backgrounds.

You've spent a meaningful portion of your career working inside complex, hardware-driven engineering environments—where systems are physical, failure is expensive, and integration risk is real. You understand that managing a program like this requires more than process fluency; it requires technical intuition, judgment under uncertainty, and credibility with engineers.

**You likely bring**:
8-10+ years in engineering execution, NPI project engineering, or technical program management within aerospace, defense, ISR, robotics, advanced mechatronics, precision optics, avionics, or similarly complex physical systems

Direct experience delivering multi-disciplinary products involving combinations of software, electronics, FPGA/gateware, precision mechanics, optics, and production ramp-up

**Exposure to environments where**:

- Prototypes fly, move, or operate in real-world conditions
- Design decisions are constrained by physics, certification, supply chain, and manufacturability
- Rework is costly, schedules are unforgiving, and just iterate later is not an option

**You are comfortable operating where**:

- Documentation, plans, and designs evolve together
- Technical teams are small, highly specialized, and deeply opinionated
- Program risk is driven as much by integration and sequencing as by task completion

**Explicitly Not a Fit if**:
This role w