Why Castelion, Why Now

Castelion is moving incredibly fast to develop and deliver advanced defense systems at a time when execution matters more than ever. We believe focus, ownership, and excellence are decisive advantages - and we're building a world-class team to turn bold ideas into real capability.

This is a rare opportunity to join at an early stage, where you'll have significant ownership, collaborate with exceptional teammates, and make a direct, measurable impact on our mission and the future of the company - regardless of your function.

Engineering Lab Manager

An Engineering Lab Manager at Castelion owns the day-to-day operation, readiness, and continuous improvement of engineering laboratory facilities supporting rapid development, integration, and test of next-generation hardware. This role is responsible for ensuring engineering teams have safe, reliable, and capable lab environments, equipment, tooling, and resources to execute their work with speed and precision.

The Engineering Lab Manager partners closely with engineering, manufacturing, facilities, safety, quality, IT, supply chain, and external vendors to establish and maintain laboratory capabilities, manage equipment and infrastructure, resolve operational constraints, and continuously improve lab efficiency and utilization.

Responsibilities:

Own the day-to-day operation and readiness of assigned engineering laboratories, ensuring facilities, equipment, tooling, utilities, and supporting infrastructure are available and capable of meeting engineering requirements.
Establish and maintain lab operating procedures, standards, and processes that enable safe, efficient, and repeatable engineering development and test activities.
Coordinate lab scheduling and resource allocation across multiple engineering teams, balancing competing priorities and maximizing utilization of shared equipment and facilities.
Own the acquisition, installation, commissioning, maintenance, calibration, and lifecycle management of laboratory equipment, instrumentation, tooling, and test infrastructure.
Develop and maintain equipment and lab readiness metrics, identifying constraints, capacity gaps, maintenance requirements, and upcoming resource needs before they impact engineering schedules.
Partner with engineering teams to define laboratory requirements for new development programs, including equipment, instrumentation, facilities, utilities, environmental requirements, test capabilities, and supporting infrastructure.
Coordinate with facilities, EHS, IT, quality, security, and other support organizations to ensure laboratories meet applicable safety, regulatory, environmental, cybersecurity, and operational requirements.
Establish and maintain relationships with equipment manufacturers, calibration providers, service organizations, contractors, and other external suppliers to support lab operations and minimize equipment downtime.
Manage laboratory inventory, consumables, spare parts, tooling, and other resources required to maintain continuous engineering operations.
Develop and implement preventive maintenance, calibration, and equipment health programs to maximize equipment availability and reliability.
Identify, prioritize, and drive closure of lab operational constraints, including equipment failures, facility limitations, utility issues, material shortages, vendor delays, and resource conflicts.
Support rapid development and test activities by coordinating lab resources and enabling engineering teams to quickly configure, modify, and validate test environments as requirements evolve.
Develop and deploy opportunities to automate, standardize, and improve laboratory processes, reducing manual effort and increasing lab utilization, reliability, and engineering throughput.
Establish systems for equipment documentation, configuration control, calibration records, maintenance history, operating procedures, and lab asset tracking.
Lead investigations into equipment or lab-related failures that impact engineering activities and drive corrective actions to prevent recurrence.