Head of Information Technology

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. Head of Information Technology Castelion is building affordable hypersonic weapons at the speed and scale required to restore American deterrence. Achieving this requires exceptional engineering, rapid testing, and manufacturing capacity—all supported by secure, reliable IT infrastructure that can keep pace with the business. The Head of Information Technology will own Castelion’s IT strategy, infrastructure, and execution across all locations. This leader will build and scale a high-performing organization while maintaining the technical depth to personally solve the company’s most difficult infrastructure challenges. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone equally capable of troubleshooting a critical outage, challenging a network architecture, recruiting exceptional technical leaders, and making high-impact investment decisions. The successful candidate combines exceptional technical judgment with a relentless bias toward action, high standards, and accountability for results. Responsibilities • Build and lead an exceptional IT organization. Recruit, develop, and retain outstanding talent across infrastructure, networking, systems, cybersecurity, and end-user support. Establish clear ownership, develop strong technical leaders, and maintain a high bar for performance and execution. • Maintain deep technical ownership. Design systems, review configurations, write automation, and troubleshoot complex failures alongside the team. Personally engage when critical problems demand your expertise and ensure solutions are technically sound and operationally durable. • Scale infrastructure across multiple sites. Deliver the connectivity, compute, storage, endpoints, and support required to bring new engineering facilities, manufacturing operations, and test locations online. Own deployment, commissioning, and operational readiness against aggressive program schedules. • Ensure reliability and operational readiness. Build resilient infrastructure, effective monitoring, tested disaster recovery, and disciplined incident response. Resolve recurring issues at their root cause and minimize downtime across critical business operations. • Accelerate engineering, manufacturing, and test. Partner directly with engineering, manufacturing, flight test, and business leaders to understand operational requirements and eliminate infrastructure bottlenecks. Treat lost engineering productivity and interrupted production as problems to solve with urgency. • Automate and standardize aggressively. Build repeatable processes for provisioning, identity and access management, configuration, patching, monitoring, and recovery. Use automation and sound architecture to improve reliability while increasing the organization’s capacity to support growth. • Implement practical, effective security. Lead IT security implementation across access controls, network segmentation, endpoint hardening, logging, vulnerability management, and protection of sensitive information. Build secure systems and workflows that enable speed without compromising required controls. • Own technology strategy and resource allocation. Manage budgets, vendors, capacity planning, and technology investments. Make sound build-versus-buy decisions, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and ensure resources deliver measurable operational value. • Establish accountability and continuous improvement. Define meaningful service and reliability metrics, set clear expectations, and ensure commitments are met. Build an organization that anticipates problems, responds decisively, and continuously raises its technical and operational standards. Basic Qualifications • Demonstrated record of exceptional personal technical achievement, with specific examples of complex systems built, difficult technical problems solved, and measurable results delivered. • Proven success leading a substantial IT or infrastructure organization, including managing managers and multiple technical disciplines. • Experience scaling an IT organization through rapid business growth while improving reliability, responsiveness, security, and technical quality. • Deep technical expertise across networking, identity and access management, Windows and Linux systems, compute, storage, cloud infrastructure, and automation, with exceptional depth in multiple areas. • Experience supporting demanding engineering, manufacturing, or test environments where infrastructure failures have immediate operational consequences. • Strong architectural judgment and the ability to translate ambiguous requirements into reliable, scalable solutions quickly. • Proven ability to attract exceptional talent, recognize technical excellence, develop future leaders, and address performance issues directly. • Excellent communication skills, decisive prioritization, and a demonstrated commitment to personal ownership and measurable outcomes. Preferred Skills and Experience • Experience with factory networks, operational technology (OT), and infrastructure supporting manufacturing and test operations. • Experience deploying IT infrastructure for new facilities, factories, and geographically distributed sites. • Familiarity with engineering compute environments, high-performance computing, and specialized technical workloads. • Experience implementing security controls in defense, aerospace, or other environments handling sensitive or controlled technical information. • Track record of building scalable, automated infrastructure that improves reliability, security, and operational efficiency. • Demonstrated ability to build and develop high-performing technical teams, establish strong leaders, and maintain exceptional execution standards. • Proven success balancing hands-on technical problem-solving with organizational leadership, strategic planning, and resource allocation. Castelion offers a generous benefits package. Please refer to the bottom of our Careers page for more details. Other Duties Please note this job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee for this job. Duties, responsibilities and activities may change at any time with or without notice. Additional Eligibility Requirements This position may require access to classified information or restricted U.S. Government sites, systems, or information, as determined by the Company and/or applicable U.S. Government requirements. If the position is so designated, your employment in the role may be contingent upon your ability to obtain and maintain the required U.S. Government security clearance or other government authorization, and to satisfy any citizenship or other eligibility requirements imposed by applicable law, regulation, executive order, or government contract requirements. You will be notified if and when such requirements apply. Affirmative Action/EEO Statement Castelion is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all applicants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law. Castelion is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disa