Vice President, General Manager

The successful candidate must combine strong business judgment with sufficient technical aptitude to lead an organization developing and manufacturing sophisticated products. This individual does not need to be the chief engineer, but must be capable of understanding technical issues, asking the right questions, challenging assumptions, assessing technical and program risk, and translating engineering decisions into customer, schedule, margin, cash, and business outcomes.

This is a hands-on general management role requiring a leader who can move comfortably between strategy and execution and who understands that sustainable growth requires simultaneous performance across customers, technology, operations, people, and financial results.

Responsibilities:

P&L and Business Leadership

• Own the full business P&L, including revenue, bookings, backlog, gross margin, operating expense, EBITDA/earnings, working capital, cash generation, and capital requirements.
• Establish and execute the annual operating plan and multi-year strategic plan.
• Translate strategy into measurable operating priorities, financial targets, resource requirements, and execution plans.
• Maintain rigorous forecasting and operating discipline across revenue, margin, labor, inventory, capital, program performance, and cash.
• Identify underperforming products, customers, programs, facilities, and cost structures and take timely corrective action.
• Balance near-term financial commitments with investment required for sustainable long-term growth.

Customer and Commercial Leadership

• Serve as a senior executive interface with key customers, strategic partners, government organizations, distributors, and international customers.
• Build and maintain strong relationships across a large and diverse customer base.
• Ensure the organization is responsive to customer requirements while protecting price, margin, scope, contractual position, and cash.
• Participate directly in major negotiations, strategic pursuits, pricing decisions, contract recovery efforts, and customer escalations.
• Strengthen bookings and backlog through reliable execution, customer confidence, new products, and disciplined pursuit of attractive opportunities.

• Ensure commercial terms appropriately address payment milestones, working capital requirements, technical scope, development risk, warranty exposure, and changes in customer requirements.

Engineering and Technology Leadership

• Provide business leadership and operating oversight to engineering and technical organizations responsible for complex engineered products.
• Establish clear priorities among customer-funded development, internal R&D, product sustainment, technical problem solving, and new product development.
• Ensure engineering resources are aligned to the highest-value business and customer priorities.
• Drive disciplined execution of engineering development programs, including requirements definition, design maturity, technical reviews, verification, validation, qualification, and production readiness.
• Challenge technical schedules, staffing assumptions, development estimates, and completion criteria when business performance or customer commitments are at risk.
• Establish effective interaction among engineering, program management, operations, supply chain, quality, sales, and finance.
• Translate technical issues into quantified schedule, cost, margin, customer, and business impacts.

New Product Introduction and Product Portfolio Management

• Lead the business through successful development, introduction, industrialization, and scaling of new products.
• Ensure new products transition effectively from engineering into repeatable production.
• Implement appropriate design-for-manufacturability, producibility, reliability, testability, supply-chain readiness, and cost controls.
• Establish clear NPI gates covering design maturity, sourcing, capital, tooling, test equipment, quality, documentation, training, production readiness, and customer qualification.
• Review the existing product portfolio and rationalize low-volume, obsolete, uncompetitive, or structurally unprofitable offerings when appropriate.
• Ensure R&D and product investments are tied to defined customer demand, competitive differentiation, margin potential, and strategic value.

Operations and Manufacturing

• Lead multi-functional manufacturing operations with accountability for safety, quality, delivery, cost, productivity, capacity, and customer performance.
• Build an operating system based on measurable performance, accountability, root-cause analysis, and corrective action.
• Improve on-time delivery, manufacturing cycle time, labor efficiency, first-pass yield, equipment effectiveness, inventory performance, and quality.
• Ensure production capacity and staffing are aligned with bookings, backlog, demand forecasts, and product introduction requirements.
• Lead facility expansions, consolidations, transfers of work, equipment investments, and footprint optimization when required.
• Establish appropriate capital planning and require clear business cases, returns, execution plans, and post-investment accountability.

Lean Six Sigma and Continuous Improvement

• Champion a practical Lean Six Sigma operating culture focused on measurable business results.
• Apply structured problem solving, root-cause analysis, corrective action, standard work, visual management, 5S, flow, waste elimination, and process control.
• Develop leaders capable of identifying and solving problems rather than escalating every issue.
• Use lean principles across the entire business—not only manufacturing—including engineering, supply chain, program management, finance, and administrative processes.
• Ensure improvement initiatives translate into measurable improvements in margin, cash, quality, delivery, capacity, productivity, or customer performance.

Program and Execution Management

• Establish disciplined governance for major customer and development programs.
• Ensure program schedules, technical milestones, costs, risks, opportunities, and customer commitments are visible and actively managed.
• Review estimates at completion and program forecasts critically and ensure they reflect current execution reality.
• Lead recovery of underperforming programs involving schedule, technical, supplier, cost, quality, or customer issues.
• Create clear recovery plans identifying containment actions, resources, owners, milestones, financial exposure, customer communication, and completion criteria.

• Ensure scope changes and customer-driven requirements are identified, priced, negotiated, and incorporated into program baselines.

Supply Chain and Working Capital

• Develop a resilient supply chain capable of supporting existing products, new product introductions, and changing customer demand.
• Improve supplier performance in quality, delivery, lead time, cost, responsiveness, and capacity.
• Maintain direct executive engagement with critical and distressed suppliers.
• Reduce excess and obsolete inventory while protecting customer delivery and production continuity.
• Improve working capital through disciplined inventory management, supplier terms, milestone billing, collections, and contract structure.
• Ensure procurement and planning decisions are aligned with actual demand, program requirements, cash constraints, and business risk.

International Business and Export Compliance

• Lead a business serving customers across multiple countries and regions.
• Support international sales channels, distributors, partners, and end customers while ensuring appropriate commercial controls and accountability.
• Maintain disciplined processes for international trade and export-controlled products, technologies, technical information, and customer interactions.
• Ensure business growth does not compromise regulatory, contractual, security, or compliance obligations.
• Work effectively with legal, contracts, trade compliance, security, finance, and other specialists when evaluating international opportunities.

Quality, Compliance, and Risk Management

• Maintain a strong culture of product quality, customer satisfaction, safety, ethics, compliance, and accountability.
• Ensure effective quality systems and disciplined corrective-action processes.

• Understand the requirements of regulated and highly controlled operating environments and ensure the organization maintains appropriate business and operational controls.
• Identify material technical, contractual, financial, supply-chain, customer, personnel, and compliance risks early and elevate issues when necessary.
• Ensure bad news moves quickly and accurately through the organization.

Organizational Leadership

• Build and lead a high-performing leadership team across engineering, operations, program management, supply chain, quality, finance, commercial functions, and human resources.
• Establish clear accountability, decision rights, priorities, and performance expectations.
• Develop talent and succession plans for critical leadership and technical positions.
• Make organizational changes when structure, capability, capacity, or leadership performance does not support the business strategy.
• Create a culture characterized by transparency, urgency, accountability, collaboration, and fact-based decision-making.
• Communicate effectively with employees at all organizational levels and maintain visible leadership across operating locations.

Requirements:

• Significant leadership experience in engineered-product, technology, aerospace, defense, electronics, industrial, communications, or advanced manufacturing environment.
• Demonstrated responsibility for a meaningful P&L or substantial operating business.
• Proven ability to manage revenue, margin, operating expense, cash, working capital, capital investment, and financial forecasting.
• Experience leading engineering-intensive businesses with complex hardware and/or electronic products.
• Demonstrated success bringing new products from development through production.
• Strong manufacturing and operational leadership capability.
• Experience applying Lean, Six Sigma, or comparable structured continuous-improvement methodologies.
• Demonstrated customer leadership, including experience managing difficult customer issues and executive-level relationships.
• Experience managing complex programs, projects, or customer commitments involving technical, schedule, and financial risk.
• Strong financial and analytical capability with the ability to challenge assumptions and drive decisions from data.
• Experience building, restructuring, or upgrading leadership teams and organizations.
• Experience working across multiple functions and operating locations.
• Experience supporting domestic and international customers and working within applicable export and trade-control requirements.

Technical Aptitude

The Vice President / General Manager must be technically credible.

The successful candidate should be able to:

• Understand system architecture, product requirements, interfaces, design maturity, verification, qualification, reliability, and manufacturing constraints.
• Engage effectively with electrical, mechanical, software, firmware, RF, systems, manufacturing, quality, and test engineering organizations as applicable to the business.

• Distinguish between a technically difficult problem and a poorly managed problem.
• Recognize when engineering schedules, staffing plans, risk assessments, or development estimates are unrealistic.
• Understand the relationship between product architecture, component selection, producibility, yield, reliability, cost, schedule, and lifecycle profitability.
• Lead technical problem-solving discussions without attempting to replace the subject-matter experts.
• Translate complex technical issues into clear decisions and business consequences.

An engineering degree may be beneficial, but demonstrated technical operating capability and experience leading complex engineered-product businesses are more important than a specific technical credential.

Leadership Characteristics

The successful candidate will:

• Operate as an owner of the entire business rather than an advocate for one function.
• Be equally comfortable in a customer meeting, engineering review, factory, operating review, and financial discussion.
• Have the confidence to challenge technical experts while respecting their expertise.
• Make fact-based decisions and insist on clear accountability.
• Act with urgency without creating unnecessary organizational disruption.
• Be willing to make difficult decisions regarding products, programs, cost structure, facilities, capital, and personnel when business conditions require them.
• Communicate clearly and directly.
• Build trust with customers and employees through reliable execution.
• Be highly visible in the business and close enough to execution to identify problems before they become crises.
• Develop strong leaders rather than becoming the decision bottleneck for the organization.

Measures of Success

Performance will be evaluated across the overall health and value creation of the business, including:

• Revenue growth
• Bookings and book-to-bill
• Backlog quality and conversion
• Gross margin
• EBITDA / operating earnings
• Operating cash flow
• Working capital
• Inventory performance
• On-time delivery
• Product quality and reliability
• Engineering milestone performance
• New product introduction performance
• Program EAC accuracy and recovery
• Customer satisfaction
• Supplier performance
• Productivity and labor efficiency
• Capital effectiveness

• Employee engagement and retention of critical talent
• Leadership-team capability and succession depth
• Compliance and safety performance

Education and Experience:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent relevant business experience required. Advanced business, engineering, operations, or technical education is beneficial.
• Lean Six Sigma certification or substantial demonstrated experience implementing lean operating systems is strongly preferred.
• Experience in regulated, government-contracting, aerospace, defense, communications, electronics, or similarly demanding environments is highly desirable.

Role Mandate

The Vice President / General Manager is expected to run the business—not simply administer it.

Success requires an executive who can create profitable growth, understand the technology, earn customer confidence, develop products, drive operational excellence, improve cash and margin, build strong leaders, solve difficult problems, and create an organization capable of delivering consistently without relying on heroic intervention.

About:

This position requires compliance with Comtech’s Drug-Free Workplace Program. Candidates must successfully complete a pre-employment drug screening as a condition of hire. Employees may be subject to random, reasonable suspicion, and post-incident testing. Illegal drug use — including marijuana, regardless of state law — is disqualifying under federal adjudicative guidelines and DoD DFARS requirements.

The pay range reflects the expected base salary for this position. Final compensation will be based on role, level, skills, experience, and geographic location. 

Comtech Telecommunications Corp. is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability protected veteran status or other characteristics protected by law.