Growth (New Missions)

There was a time when all of America believed that the future of the physical world could be radically different. The engineers of the mid-1900s put a man on the moon in eight years, designed and built planes and submarines from scratch in under three, and conceived of building things we wouldn’t even be able to dream up today.

Today, the last of the engineers who imagined and built these systems are retiring. As they go, we lose not only the engineering knowledge gained from their decades of imagination and trial-and-error, but also the spirit that made that imagination possible.

Amca is working day-in and day-out to restore America’s ability to engineer anything that our critical systems depend on, and reinvigorate the cycle of creation that allows imagination to shape physical reality. We rapidly develop and manufacture new critical components and subsystems required to build and sustain the planes, military vehicles, and core infrastructure America needs. By restoring the capability of our antiquated supply chains, we increase the country’s capacity to imagine and realize new systems, and make a physical world that looks very different from today.

Role Overview

Amca’s Growth team comprises a small group of generalists that work on asymmetric special projects to expand the scope of the business and help it scale. Specifically, this team works closely with the CEO to: (1) identify ways to help the business scale more effectively and pursue net-new opportunities, from new markets and product lines to new operating principles and types of customer engagements; and (2) do the zero-to-one work to run down hypotheses and make these real.

While each person on the Growth team is expected to support on a range of projects, this person will focus on a core “new missions” project for the first 6-12 months. At a high level, this project entails, in essence, helping found a new startup within the company: the role combines the first-principles, creative research muscle of a hedge fund or venture investor with the commercial instinct and confrontational disposition of an entrepreneur. You will sit on the Growth team, report to the VP of Growth, and work closely with the CEO and executive leadership team to shape how Amca grows outside of A&D over the coming decade.

The New Missions Project

Over the past two years, Amca has built a core engineering muscle to solve the constraints within production and sustainment for commercial aerospace and defense, which manifest most acutely in the component and subsystem supply chain for these systems. Building on this work and our initial forays outside of A&D, this person will:

• Discover the most important problem that Amca can solve across other rapidly shifting critical industries, from energy and semiconductor manufacturing to robotics and more.
• Develop a mission-driven plan based on top-down and bottoms-up research to solve this problem—combining a capital investment plan, initial customer engagements, operational details, and staffing needs.

Responsibilities (in relation to this project)

• Research non-A&D constraints both top-down and bottoms-up by studying public company filings and talking with customers, suppliers, and competitors to identify the biggest opportunities to apply engineering to solve massive problems.
• Develop theses you deeply believe in for how we specifically should turn this research into actions, using acquisitions or partnerships wherever necessary, but focusing primarily on identifying ways we can solve real problems.
• Shape and position creative solutions to these problems for customers based on what makes sense from first principles, not strictly based on the model that Amca has applied to solve problems in A&D.
• Bring concrete, revenue-generating pilot opportunities with customers that arise during the research process to help validate theses and allow us to learn and gain conviction in allocating growing resources to these markets.
• Help with the zero-to-one work of standing up new teams where necessary to pursue the opportunity at scale.
• Support other special projects on the Growth team as necessary, which may flex up or down depending on broader company priorities.

Traits

• Capable of coming up with and believing in a mission
• Do you think about opportunities in ways that extend beyond purely financial calculus?
• Deep first-principles thinking
• Are you able to entertain and believe in extremely non-consensus ideas?
• Can you justify your belief in non-consensus ideas clearly in writing?
• Extreme clarity of action
• Can you continually come up with sensible actions to take during an open-ended exploration process in which the search space is theoretically infinite?

Annual Salary Range

$130,000 — $200,000 USD

This position requires use of information which is subject to the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). All applicants must be U.S. persons within the meaning of ITAR. ITAR defines a US person as: any individual who is granted U.S. citizenship; or. any individual who is granted U.S. permanent residence ("Green Card" holder); or. any individual who is granted status as a "protected person" under 8 U.S.C 1324b(a)(3).

Amca, Inc prohibits discrimination or harassment based on the following categories: race, color, religion, religious creed (including religious dress and grooming practices), national origin, ancestry, citizenship, physical or mental disability, medical condition (including cancer and genetic characteristics), genetic information, marital status, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, or related medical conditions), gender, gender identity, gender expression, age (40 years and over), sexual orientation, veteran and/or military status, protected medical leaves (requesting or approved for leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act or the California Family Rights Act), domestic violence victim status, political affiliation, and any other status protected by state or federal law.