Oklo - Director of Manufacturing Strategy

• Bachelor's degree in mechanical, manufacturing, industrial, materials, aerospace, nuclear, or a closely related engineering discipline. • 10+ years of progressive experience in manufacturing engineering, industrialization, production engineering, supplier manufacturing, operations strategy, or a related hardware-manufacturing field, including meaningful leadership responsibility. • Demonstrated ability to understand and evaluate manufacturing processes, process capability, tooling, qualification, yield, cycle time, throughput, capacity, quality controls, and production risk. • Experience supporting complex, low-volume or FOAK hardware through supplier selection, development, qualification, and transition toward repeatable production. • Experience leading make-vs-buy, manufacturing-footprint, capacity, cost, or industrialization analyses with cross-functional stakeholders. • Ability to combine incomplete technical, commercial, and schedule information into practical recommendations and clearly state assumptions, tradeoffs, risks, and decision points. • Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to work effectively with Responsible Engineers, suppliers, procurement professionals, executives, and program leaders. • Willingness to travel to supplier sites, manufacturing locations, and Oklo headquarters as business needs require. • Master of Business Administration (MBA), master's degree in engineering, or equivalent commercial, finance, corporate strategy, or business-development experience. • Experience in nuclear energy, aerospace, defense, semiconductors, energy systems, advanced industrial equipment, or another highly regulated hardware environment. • Direct experience across both technical manufacturing and commercial or strategic decision-making, including should-cost analysis, total-cost modeling, capacity investment cases, or supplier business assessments. • Experience with fabrication and special processes such as machining, welding, forming, casting, forging, additive manufacturing, heat treatment, coatings, nondestructive examination, or complex assembly. • Experience scaling from prototype or FOAK builds into low-rate initial production and higher-rate manufacturing. • Familiarity with nuclear-quality, export-control, or other regulated supply-chain requirements. • Competencies • We are looking for a Director of Manufacturing Strategy who is: • Strategic and technically grounded: Connects manufacturing details to enterprise choices without losing sight of what must happen on the shop floor. • Strategic and technically grounded: • Commercially fluent: Understands that supplier capability, price, lead time, investment, risk, and incentives must be evaluated together. • Commercially fluent: • A systems thinker: Recognizes dependencies across design maturity, qualification, sourcing, capacity, schedule, and production scale. • A systems thinker: • A decisive collaborator: Builds alignment across Engineering, Procurement, Strategy, Quality, Programs, and Fabrication while maintaining clear decision ownership. • A decisive collaborator: • Comfortable with ambiguity: Can structure incomplete FOAK problems, test assumptions, and recommend a path forward. • Comfortable with ambiguity: • Credible with suppliers: Can enter a manufacturing environment, ask the right questions, identify constraints, and work constructively toward solutions. • Credible with suppliers: • An effective communicator: Explains complex technical and commercial tradeoffs clearly in modern, active language. • An effective communicator: • Mission-driven and pragmatic: Is excited to make advanced fission a reality and balances creativity with disciplined execution. • Mission-driven and pragmatic: • A startup person: You aren't driven by titles or hierarchy, and prefer efficiency to excess process. You don't need or expect to have a lot of guidance but you enjoy working in a fast-paced team. If you prefer the culture and feel of a large organization, that is great, but you likely won’t enjoy working with us! There is plenty of important work and plenty of good opportunities with organizations like that. You value outcomes over hierarchy, move quickly with limited guidance, and use process only when it improves the work. • Motivated: You are self-motivated. You bring an enthusiasm to the team, and imbue a sense of passion that goes beyond clocking in and clocking out. This isn’t about a fake or arbitrary “pieces of flair” mentality or lack of work-life balance! It is about being a part of the vision and feeling a part of reaching team goals. You bring energy, initiative, and a genuine commitment to team and company goals. • A team-player: Oklo genuinely is a team. We aren’t about taking credit for ourselves, and we aren’t about pushing blame to others. We do incredible things because we work as a team. You share ownership, give credit freely, and solve problems across organizational boundaries. • An excellent communicator: We need a person who is not only technically competent but also a clear and upbeat communicator. • Creative: Being creative means that when things fall outside clear scopes or processes or problems arise without clear solutions, you are able to identify it as well as invent ways to solve a problem or fill a need without micromanagement. The successful person in this job will not only be creative, but also enjoy being creative and solving open-ended problems which may change day-by-day. You enjoy open-ended problems, recognize when no standard path exists, and invent practical ways forward. • Detail-oriented: This focus is a big part of excellence, consistency, and quality. Excellent grammar and spelling matter for both good communication as well as the image of the company that we put forward. You understand that disciplined analysis, accurate assumptions, and clear documentation are essential to high-quality decisions. • This role is expected to travel approximately 25% of the time to supplier and manufacturing sites and to Oklo's headquarters, based on program and business needs. Remote employees are also expected to travel to headquarters or another designated location twice per quarter for team meetings, off-sites, and company events, as needed.