Regional Manager

The Role

Leidos Defense Systems sector is looking for someone to fill a Quality Business Area Manager role in Huntsville, AL. This isn't a junior position. It's for someone who can build and protect a quality culture across the business area, working directly with senior program quality managers to make sure mission assurance and performance excellence aren't just slogans on a wall.

What You'll Actually Do

You'll own the quality engineering and control activities for the business area. That means building, deploying, and maintaining an effective quality management system using data analytics, product inspections, and predictive measures. You'll spot risks early and do something about them before they turn into problems.

• Conduct independent inspections, audits, and reviews of products, processes, and measurements; catch issues at the earliest possible moment ; not after they've become someone else's headache.
• Escalate quality issues in a way that's informative, substantive, timely, transparent ; fix it now; don't just file a report.
• Make sure everything complies with statutory requirements, regulatory requirements, contractual requirements, corporate policies, program plans, specifications ; all of it.
• Help implement practices that meet ISO 9001, ISO 27001 (if AS9100 applies), AS6500 (same caveat), CMMI DEV (depending on Leidos/contractual needs), CMMI SVC (as applicable) ; basically whatever standards apply to the work we do.
• Resolve internal and external audit findings quickly by doing root cause analysis; put corrective/preventive measures in place so it doesn't happen again.
• Run trend analysis at both organization and program levels to find areas for improvement; then actually implement those improvements.
• Do deep dives on program/project issues when they pop up ; facilitate containment actions, corrective/preventive actions and capture lessons learned so nobody repeats the mistake.
• Review contract deliverables against requirements and quality standards before they go out the door.
• Identify metrics that track program performance; use those measures to drive process improvement initiatives.
• Lead structured improvement activities: kaizens JDI projects root cause analysis sessions; push continual improvement from individual programs up into the business area level (and potentially beyond).
• Monitor pre award opportunities in your business area so quality engineering costs are properly bid; identify what makes us different versus competitors related to quality; keep strategic awareness of what we need competitively from a quality standpoint.
• Engage with proposals once they're won ; establish SLAs/key performance indicators that prove you understand mission requirements; give customers tools to measure our success meaningfully rather than just checkbox style tracking .

The Details That Matter

A bit more: