Quality & Operational Compliance Leader

Company Overview

Metrea delivers effects-as-a-service to national security partners across five domains and more than a dozen mission areas. These include airborne ISR, electronic warfare, secure communications, aerial refueling, special air missions, aerial firefighting, and advanced simulation. We own the whole stack: designing, building, and operating turnkey capabilities that give our partners decisive, asymmetric advantage against rapidly evolving threats.

Our operating model is built around three interlocking pillars. The Support Groups provide a global shared-service – spanning people, finance, platform, operations, legal, and engagement. This frees up our Core Groups, who develop and own mission capabilities end-to-end, to focus entirely on delivery. The Market Groups apply a regional lens, ensuring that our agile and adaptable capabilities remain aligned to the wicked problems that matter most to our partners across the Americas, EMEA, and Asia-Pacific.

At the heart of our model is a simple but powerful idea: be a true partner with skin in the game. Our partners need effects, not just equipment. By owning the full stack – from the lab to the field – we are able to drive a continuous cycle of innovation that keeps our partners ahead. It's a fast-moving, intellectually demanding environment where talented people are given real responsibility, work on problems that matter, and contribute to an enterprise that is growing quickly and deliberately.

Headquartered in Washington, DC, with facilities across the United States, the United Kingdom, as well as Continental Europe and Asia-Pacific.

Group Overview

Metrea delivers effects-as-a-service to national security partners across five domains and more than a dozen mission areas, including airborne ISR, electronic warfare, secure communications, aerial refuelling, special mission aviation, aerial firefighting, and advanced simulation.

Metrea is actively building its presence in Australia as part of a deliberate, globally coordinated expansion into the Asia-Pacific region. Our Asia-Pacific Market Group, headquartered in Brisbane with an additional office in Perth, is the enterprise's dedicated regional interface, connecting Australia's national security community with Metrea's full suite of capabilities across three core domains: Aerospace, Electromagnetic & Cyber, and Digital & Synthetic. Metrea is now bringing that same depth of mission expertise and proven operating model to Australia.

Underpinning these capabilities is a global network of Support Groups spanning people, finance, platform, operations, legal, and engagement, ensuring that as we grow in Australia, we do so with the full weight of an established global enterprise behind us.

Metrea's solutions are built for elegance: effective, efficient, and evolving, enabling our partners to scale capacity and achieve asymmetric advantage against rapidly evolving threats.

Position Summary

In this role, you will lead the implementation, certification and ongoing maintenance of Metrea's Integrated Management System (IMS) in Australia. Your immediate priority will be to establish and demonstrate the ISO 9001-certified Quality Management System required to support mobilisation and delivery of the Australian contract. You will then coordinate the Australian compliance environment across the other management-system standards adopted within the enterprise IMS, including AS9100, ISO 14001, ISO 45001 and ISO 27001 where applicable to the certified scope.

You will be Metrea's principal in-country operational compliance specialist and a member of the enterprise Safety, Operational Compliance & Training team, working alongside specialists responsible for the Americas and EMEA. You will partner with Australian leaders and process owners to translate contractual, regulatory, customer and certification requirements into practical processes and reliable evidence. You will provide independent assurance without taking ownership away from the leaders responsible for operating those processes.

You will be successful if you can build a proportionate management system that supports delivery rather than adding unnecessary bureaucracy, identify the difference between documented arrangements and work as performed, and help teams address weaknesses before they become audit findings or operational failures.

What You'll Do

• Lead the design, implementation and certification of the Australian Quality Management System to ISO 9001, ensuring the contractually required certified system is achieved and maintained within the required timeframe

• Coordinate implementation and ongoing governance of the wider enterprise IMS in Australia, including applicable AS9100, ISO 14001, ISO 45001 and ISO 27001 requirements

• Maintain a clear register of contractual, customer, regulatory and management-system requirements, assign them to appropriate process owners and monitor the evidence of continuing conformity

• Partner with Australian leaders and functional owners to develop proportionate processes, procedures, records and controls that meet requirements and support effective operations

• Develop and deliver a risk-based programme of internal audits, compliance assessments and gap analyses that tests both documented arrangements and work as performed

• Coordinate external certification and surveillance audits, including audit planning, evidence readiness, registrar liaison, responses to findings and verification of corrective-action effectiveness

• Manage the Australian non-conformance and corrective-action process, supporting sound root-cause analysis, monitoring actions to closure and escalating overdue or ineffective responses

• Prepare management-review inputs and provide leaders with clear analysis of compliance performance, systemic weaknesses, recurring findings, emerging risks and improvement priorities

• Provide practical advice, coaching and awareness training on the IMS, audit readiness, process ownership, risk-based thinking and evidence of conformity

• Collaborate with the Americas and EMEA Operational Compliance Specialists to maintain consistent enterprise standards, share lessons, conduct cross-regional assurance and support wider certification priorities

What You Bring

• A recognised qualification in quality, engineering, aviation, business, risk, compliance or a related discipline, supported by relevant professional experience

• Ideally five plus years of progressively responsible experience in quality assurance, operational compliance, management systems or regulatory compliance within aviation, aerospace, defence or another highly regulated sector

• Demonstrated experience implementing, maintaining or materially improving an ISO 9001-certified Quality Management System

• Strong working knowledge of ISO 9001 and practical understanding of integrated management systems, including the relationship between quality, environmental, WHS, information-security and aerospace-quality requirements

• Experience planning and conducting internal audits, supporting external certification audits, managing findings and verifying corrective-action effectiveness

• Strong understanding of process ownership, risk-based thinking, root-cause analysis, performance measurement, management review and continual improvement

• Ability to interpret contractual and technical requirements, determine their practical implications and convert them into clear processes and objective evidence

• Strong judgement, professional independence and communication skills, with the ability to influence senior leaders and operational teams constructively in a global matrixed organisation

Nice to Haves

• Lead Auditor or Internal Auditor qualification for ISO 9001 or AS9100, with additional auditor competence in ISO 14001, ISO 45001 or ISO 27001

• Experience establishing a new certified management system or extending an existing certification into a new legal entity, geogra