Manager - Special Programs

About the role

Saronic Technologies is building autonomous maritime platforms and needs a Special Programs Manager to serve as the administrative and operational backbone of its fast‑moving prototype team. You will keep projects on schedule, manage budgets and resources, and enable a small group of engineers to iterate quickly on new ideas.

Key responsibilities

• Provide day‑to‑day administrative management, including scheduling, staffing, budgets, procurement, vendor coordination and progress reporting.
• Plan, track and report on prototype builds, field tests and demonstrations, ensuring milestones and deliverables stay aligned across electrical, mechanical and software contributors.
• Offer focused technical input during design reviews to challenge assumptions, unblock the team and translate progress for non‑technical stakeholders.
• Partner with the VP of Product and the CTO to surface, scope and prioritize new ideas, keeping Special Programs synchronized with the broader product roadmap.
• Represent the team internally to Growth, Finance and Engineering, and externally to suppliers, government and commercial customers.

Required profile

• Experience managing small, fast‑moving engineering or R&D teams, preferably in robotics, aerospace, defense or other hardware‑intensive environments.
• Technical literacy in autonomy, embedded systems, robotics, electrical or mechanical engineering sufficient to lead substantive conversations with engineers.
• Proven ability to plan and execute against budgets, schedules and resource constraints with limited overhead.
• Comfort partnering with senior technical and product leaders to evaluate opportunities and turn ambiguous ideas into structured plans.
• Experience supporting prototype hardware development, field testing or government demonstrations is strongly preferred.

Required skills

• Autonomy
• Embedded systems
• Robotics
• Electrical engineering
• Mechanical engineering