Required qualifications
- 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. supporting complex, low-volume or FOAK hardware through supplier selection, development, qualification, and transition toward repeatable production. 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. 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. with fabrication and special processes such as machining, welding, forming, casting, forging, additive manufacturing, heat treatment, coatings, nondestructive examination, or complex assembly. 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.
About this role
The Director of Manufacturing Strategy will define and continuously refine how Oklo converts ambitious product and deployment plans into an executable manufacturing system. Reporting to the Head of Supply Chain, this leader will integrate engineering judgment, supplier-market intelligence, commercial inputs, and strategic analysis to help Oklo achieve aggressive lead-time, cost, quality, and scalability goals.
Responsibilities
- Own Oklo's enterprise manufacturing strategy, connecting product and deployment plans to executable manufacturing pathways across external suppliers and internal fabrication.
- Lead cross-functional make-vs-buy analyses and recommendations using technical feasibility, supplier capability and capacity, lead time, cost, quality, schedule risk, capital requirements, intellectual property, and long-term scalability.
- Build decision frameworks and provide supply-market intelligence to the Strategy team so alternative manufacturing scenarios can be modeled with credible assumptions and sensitivities.
- Partner with Responsible Engineers during FOAK execution to define supplier manufacturing strategies, review process plans, identify manufacturability risks, and improve the likelihood of delivering conforming hardware on schedule.
- Assess suppliers' manufacturing processes, equipment, workforce, quality systems, special-process controls, qualification paths, current loading, surge capacity, and ability to meet Oklo's forecast production rates.
- Translate supplier assessments into actionable technical recommendations for Engineering and clear capability guidance for Procurement, while preserving Procurement's ownership of commercial negotiations, contracts, and supplier relationships.
- Identify critical manufacturing constraints and fragile supply-chain nodes; develop mitigation options such as alternate processes, supplier development plans, second sources, design changes, phased capacity investments, or selective insourcing.
- Support technical vetting and due diligence of potential suppliers alongside Engineering, Quality, and Procurement, including site visits, process reviews, readiness assessments, and production-rate validation.
- Develop industrialization and manufacturing-readiness roadmaps that bridge FOAK builds to repeatable production, including learning-curve assumptions, yield and throughput improvement, tooling, automation, qualification, and capacity ramps.
- Establish and track manufacturing-strategy metrics and decision milestones related to lead time, cost, quality, capacity, scalability, risk retirement, and make-vs-buy outcomes.
Preferred qualifications
- Master of Business Administration (MBA), master's degree in engineering, or equivalent commercial, finance, corporate strategy, or business-development experience.
Location, schedule, and travel
hybrid technical and commercial strategy role.
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