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Xcimer Energy is developing inertial fusion energy (IFE) technology to deploy fusion power plants and meet global decarbonization goals. The company combines decades of fusion research with groundbreaking laser architecture and is backed by leading investors.
As Business Strategy & Operations Lead, you will serve as the connective tissue between Xcimer's strategic priorities and day-to-day execution. Reporting to the Chief Operating Officer, you will partner with Program Management and the Chief of Staff to close gaps between leadership decisions and implementation, run analyses that inform program and resource prioritization, and drive the rollout and adoption of new operational processes across the company.
Key responsibilities include:
- Serve as the implementation arm for newly approved operational processes: write process documentation, design and run training and rollout plans, and own post-implementation adoption reviews.
- Own operational projects end-to-end—from problem definition through solutioning and implementation—coordinating finance, procurement, IT, facilities, and HR on company-wide initiatives that span multiple functions.
- Own headcount planning and demand/supply forecasting for business-operations functions, building tooling and processes to support efficient resource allocation as the company scales.
- Define and evolve Xcimer's operational knowledge-management and information architecture (e.g., Confluence), driving adoption and content hygiene across departments.
- Maintain a prioritized backlog of identified operational process gaps and recommend sequencing and resourcing to close them.
- Partner with other departments to map end-to-end business data workflows (e.g., Teamcenter, Boltline, ERP) and drive resolution of cross-team data and process gaps.
- Work with the Chief of Staff to translate decisions and action items from executive offsites and business reviews into resourced initiatives with clear owners, timelines, and follow-through.
- Identify, evaluate, and help mitigate operational risks and single points of failure across business operations functions.
- Partner with Finance to build and maintain program-level economic models that connect technical and schedule decisions to long-run plant economics, capital requirements, and investment tradeoffs.
- Partner with the Head of PMO to represent business-operations capacity and constraints in program planning, ensuring program schedules are realistic.
- Project-manage across large, cross-functional stakeholder groups: lead working sessions, wrangle multiple threads, and report progress to executive stakeholders.
- Prepare analysis and materials to support budget reviews, board updates, and investor reporting as requested by the COO.
Requirements:
- Bachelor's degree in business, engineering, operations, or a related field; MBA or equivalent experience a plus.
- 5+ years of experience in strategy, business operations, program management, or management consulting, ideally supporting a hardware, deep-tech, or complex engineering organization.
- Demonstrated experience designing and rolling out operational processes end-to-end—including training and post-implementation follow-through—in a fast-growing or resource-constrained organization.
- Demonstrated experience with headcount planning, demand/supply forecasting, or workforce modeling in a scaling organization.
- Experience supporting facilities or space planning, ideally across multiple sites.
- Strong analytical and financial modeling skills, with comfort building quantitative models that connect technical or program decisions to business and economic outcomes.
- High ownership and low ego, with a bias toward proactively stepping into ambiguous, cross-functional problems.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to work effectively across engineering, finance, procurement, IT, and executive stakeholders.
- Must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum.
Desired qualifications:
- Experience in fusion, aerospace, defense, or other capital-intensive hardware development environments.
- Familiarity with PLM/ERP and business data systems (e.g., Teamcenter, Boltline) and the challenges of integrating data across them.
- Experience administering or architecting Confluence or similar knowledge-management platforms at scale.
- Experience with BI/analytics platforms such as Looker, Tableau, or similar.
- Experience establishing or scaling a PMO, or working closely alongside one, in a matrixed engineering organization.
- Project Management Professional (PMP) or similar certification.
