Value Stream Leader

Value Stream Leader

Ontic, a leading licensor and manufacturer of complex engineering parts for the global aerospace and defence industries, is now recruiting for a Value Stream Leader to join our Programmes team. This is a pivotal role responsible for leading customer relationships, driving financial performance, and ensuring end-to-end delivery across a defined portfolio of programmes.

Ontic is more than just a business, we’re a community of innovators who pride ourselves on fostering a culture where talent thrives, ideas flourish, and careers are built. We’re committed to excellence, continuously improving and adapting to remain at the forefront of our industry.

The Role

Reporting to the Director of Programmes, the Value Stream Leader is responsible for the end-to-end management of a portfolio of customer relationships, with a strong focus on customer engagement, operational delivery, and financial performance.

You will lead a cross-functional value stream team, including Programme Managers, Account Managers, and Account Administrators, ensuring all activity across the business is aligned to customer requirements and commercial objectives.

You’ll define and execute medium- and long-term strategies for your customer portfolio, ensuring alignment with Ontic’s wider business goals while identifying opportunities for growth, efficiency, and value creation.

Key to success in this role is the ability to balance strategic thinking with hands-on execution, driving performance across customer engagement, forecasting, pricing, and operational delivery.

In this role, you will:

• Develop and maintain customer and product line strategies, aligned to business objectives
• Coordinate pricing, RFQs and RFPs in collaboration with Sales and Revenue Management to maximise value
• Build and maintain strong, long-term customer relationships, acting as a key point of contact and escalation
• Proactively resolve customer issues, ensuring high levels of engagement and satisfaction
• Analyse market dynamics to optimise inventory levels, lead times, and commercial opportunities
• Support delivery of key operational metrics, including on-time delivery and arrears recovery
• Lead demand forecasting and input into the SIOP process
• Own financial forecasting and reporting, including weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual outlooks
• Drive margin performance, identifying opportunities for improvement across materials, manufacturing, and quality
• Ensure effective coordination across operations, supply chain, quality, and compliance functions
• Lead, coach, and develop your team, building capability and supporting succession planning

About You

At Ontic, our culture is key to how we deliver success. We’re looking for someone who brings strong leadership capability alongside commercial and operational expertise, and who thrives in a collaborative, fast-paced environment.

To be successful in this role, you will bring:

• Proven experience managing customer accounts, programmes, or contracts within aerospace, defence, or a similar industrial environment
• Strong leadership experience, with the ability to develop and inspire high-performing teams
• Excellent commercial and financial acumen, with experience in forecasting, margin management, and business planning
• The ability to build strong relationships with customers, suppliers, and internal stakeholders
• A structured, detail-oriented approach, combined with pragmatic problem-solving skills
• Experience working across cross-functional teams including operations, supply chain, quality, and compliance

You will also ideally have:

• Experience with UK, EU, and US commercial or government contracting
• Knowledge of import/export regulations
• A strong understanding of aerospace or defence markets

Best Place to Work

We are more than the sum of our parts — and we’ve been recognised for it:

• Ranked #9 in Best Companies’ Q3 leaderboard for Best Manufacturing Company
• 72.5% of employees in our 2023 survey said they are proud to work at Ontic
• We’ve experienced rapid growth, doubling in size in recent years

No day is the same at Ontic. Our success comes from empowering our colleagues to create opportunity, fostering an environment of autonomy where we ask for forgiveness, not permission.

Our Values

Our values are intrinsic to everything we do:

• We share a common sense – a global family of specialists with a shared passion for precision
• We have the freedom to choose – challengers and innovators who think differently
• We create the opportunity – change-makers with a clear direction and can-do spirit

We are a fast-paced business with ambitious growth plans; so if you are dedicated, enthusiastic and always seeking ways to improve, you'll enjoy a career with us!