Production Engineering Manager Jobs in California
Production Engineering Manager jobs in California are among the most actively recruited engineering leadership roles in the country, concentrated in semiconductor manufacturing, aerospace and defense, biomedical devices, and consumer electronics across a seniority range from first-line manager through senior director. The largest hiring centers are the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and San Diego, where companies like Applied Materials, Northrop Grumman, and Qualcomm maintain deep production engineering footprints. Demand is strongest for managers with backgrounds in process optimization, lean manufacturing, and new product introduction. Find a role that fits below and apply directly.
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Manager – Production Operations & Site Reliability Engineering
At Alcon, we are driven by the meaningful work we do to help people see brilliantly. We innovate boldly, champion progress, and act with speed as the global leader in eye care. Here, you’ll be recognized for your commitment and contributions and see your career like never before. Together, we go above and beyond to make an impact in the lives of our patients and customers.
We foster an inclusive culture and are looking for diverse, talented people to join Alcon. As a Principal Engineer you will provide technical leadership for the reliability, availability, security, and continuous improvement of Alcon’s Digital Health Cloud platform supporting Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) and customer-facing digital health applications.
This role serves as the senior technical authority for production operations and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), driving platform reliability, observability, automation, incident management, release governance, and cloud optimization. Partnering across Product Engineering, Architecture, Security, Infrastructure, and Operations, the Principal Engineer enables resilient, compliant, and scalable healthcare platforms with predictable, high-quality software delivery. In this role, a typical day will include:
Production Operations & Reliability
- Lead steady-state operations for cloud-based healthcare platforms, ensuring high availability, reliability, and performance.
- Establish and continuously improve operational standards, SLIs/SLOs, readiness reviews, and service excellence practices.
- Drive platform resilience, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and governance through Alcon’s Steady State Operations Framework (SSOF).
Release & Deployment Governance
- Lead production readiness reviews, ensuring applications meet operational, security, monitoring, compliance, and supportability requirements.
- Govern the Road to Production process across Validation, Staging, and Production environments, validating deployment readiness, infrastructure qualification, rollback plans, and acceptance criteria.
- Partner with Engineering and DevOps teams to improve release quality, deployment reliability, and change success through standardized governance and automation.
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
- Champion SRE best practices, leveraging automation and self-healing capabilities to reduce operational toil.
- Improve service reliability and customer experience by reducing MTTD and MTTR and increasing deployment success rates.
- Lead incident investigations, root cause analyses, and long-term corrective actions for critical production events.
Cloud Platform Operations
- Provide technical leadership across AWS platforms including EKS, EC2, RDS, S3, ElastiCache, AWS MQ, Route53, and Kubernetes/Istio.
- Optimize cloud infrastructure for scalability, resilience, security, performance, and cost efficiency.
Observability & Automation
- Define enterprise observability strategies using Datadog, CloudWatch, distributed tracing, synthetic monitoring, centralized logging, and executive dashboards.
- Lead automation initiatives across deployments, monitoring, health validation, incident response, and operational workflows.
Security & Compliance
- Ensure compliance with HIPAA, GDPR, FDA, and enterprise cybersecurity standards.
- Partner with Security teams to strengthen cloud security architecture, identity management, network segmentation, and operational controls.
Technical Leadership
- Serve as the senior escalation point for major incidents, production events, and Hypercare operations.
- Mentor engineering teams on operational excellence, production engineering, and SRE best practices.
- Influence platform and architectural decisions that enhance operability, maintainability, resilience, and long-term service reliability.
- Collaborate across Engineering, Architecture, Infrastructure, Security, and Global Operations to advance platform stability and operational maturity.
WHAT YOU’LL BRING TO ALCON:
Bachelor’s Degree or Equivalent years of directly related experience (or high school +13 yrs; Assoc.+9 yrs; M.S.+2 yrs; PhD+0 yrs)
The ability to fluently read, write, understand and communicate in English
5 Years of Relevant Experience
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:
- Bachelor’s Degree in degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (Master’s preferred)
- Experience in Production Operations, Site Reliability Engineering, Platform Engineering, or Cloud Operations
- Experience supporting regulated healthcare or medical device platforms
- AWS Solutions Architect or DevOps Professional certification
- Kubernetes (CKA/CKS) certification
- Experience with healthcare interoperability standards (HL7, FHIR, DICOM)
- Experience implementing Site Reliability Engineering practices within large-scale cloud environments
- AWS (EKS, EC2, RDS, S3, Route53, IAM, Load Balancers, CloudWatch)
- Kubernetes, Istio, Docker
- Datadog, APM, logging, distributed tracing, synthetic monitoring
- CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, automation
- HIPAA, GDPR, FDA compliance
- Strong understanding of cloud networking, security, and high-availability architectures
HOW YOU CAN THRIVE AT ALCON:
- Benefit from working in a highly collaborative environment.
- Join Alcon’s mission to provide top-tier, innovative products to enhance sight, enhance lives, and grow your career.
- Alcon provides robust benefits package including health, life, retirement, PTO, and much more!
Alcon Careers
See your impact at alcon.com/careers
ATTENTION: Current Alcon Employee/Contingent Worker
If you are currently an active employee/contingent worker at Alcon, please click the appropriate link below to apply on the Internal Career site.
Find Jobs for Employees
Find Jobs for Contingent Worker
Compensation and Benefits
Alcon’s Total Rewards programs are designed to align incentives with business objectives, support our values, and deliver long‑term value. Our compensation approach includes a combination of fixed and variable pay, with short‑term and long‑term incentive opportunities for eligible roles. Our benefits offerings are designed to support associates and their families across key life events, including programs that promote health and well‑being, provide financial security, and support retirement planning.
The salary range posted represents the anticipated hiring range for this role. Actual compensation may vary based on factors such as experience, skills, location, and internal equity, and may fall outside the posted range.
Pay Range
140,250.00 - 181,500.00
Pay Frequency
Annual
Alcon is an Equal Opportunity Employer and participates in E-Verify. Alcon takes pride in maintaining a diverse environment and our policies are not to discriminate in recruitment, hiring, training, promotion or other employment practices for reasons of race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital or veteran status, disability, or any other legally protected status. Alcon is also committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodation to individuals with disabilities. If, because of a medical condition or disability, you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the application process, or in order to perform the essential functions of a position, please send an email to alcon.recruitment@alcon.com and let us know the nature of your request and your contact information.
Manager – Production Operations & Site Reliability Engineering
At Alcon, we are driven by the meaningful work we do to help people see brilliantly. We innovate boldly, champion progress, and act with speed as the global leader in eye care. Here, you’ll be recognized for your commitment and contributions and see your career like never before. Together, we go above and beyond to make an impact in the lives of our patients and customers.
We foster an inclusive culture and are looking for diverse, talented people to join Alcon. As a Principal Engineer you will provide technical leadership for the reliability, availability, security, and continuous improvement of Alcon’s Digital Health Cloud platform supporting Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) and customer-facing digital health applications.
This role serves as the senior technical authority for production operations and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), driving platform reliability, observability, automation, incident management, release governance, and cloud optimization. Partnering across Product Engineering, Architecture, Security, Infrastructure, and Operations, the Principal Engineer enables resilient, compliant, and scalable healthcare platforms with predictable, high-quality software delivery. In this role, a typical day will include:
Production Operations & Reliability
- Lead steady-state operations for cloud-based healthcare platforms, ensuring high availability, reliability, and performance.
- Establish and continuously improve operational standards, SLIs/SLOs, readiness reviews, and service excellence practices.
- Drive platform resilience, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and governance through Alcon’s Steady State Operations Framework (SSOF).
Release & Deployment Governance
- Lead production readiness reviews, ensuring applications meet operational, security, monitoring, compliance, and supportability requirements.
- Govern the Road to Production process across Validation, Staging, and Production environments, validating deployment readiness, infrastructure qualification, rollback plans, and acceptance criteria.
- Partner with Engineering and DevOps teams to improve release quality, deployment reliability, and change success through standardized governance and automation.
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
- Champion SRE best practices, leveraging automation and self-healing capabilities to reduce operational toil.
- Improve service reliability and customer experience by reducing MTTD and MTTR and increasing deployment success rates.
- Lead incident investigations, root cause analyses, and long-term corrective actions for critical production events.
Cloud Platform Operations
- Provide technical leadership across AWS platforms including EKS, EC2, RDS, S3, ElastiCache, AWS MQ, Route53, and Kubernetes/Istio.
- Optimize cloud infrastructure for scalability, resilience, security, performance, and cost efficiency.
Observability & Automation
- Define enterprise observability strategies using Datadog, CloudWatch, distributed tracing, synthetic monitoring, centralized logging, and executive dashboards.
- Lead automation initiatives across deployments, monitoring, health validation, incident response, and operational workflows.
Security & Compliance
- Ensure compliance with HIPAA, GDPR, FDA, and enterprise cybersecurity standards.
- Partner with Security teams to strengthen cloud security architecture, identity management, network segmentation, and operational controls.
Technical Leadership
- Serve as the senior escalation point for major incidents, production events, and Hypercare operations.
- Mentor engineering teams on operational excellence, production engineering, and SRE best practices.
- Influence platform and architectural decisions that enhance operability, maintainability, resilience, and long-term service reliability.
- Collaborate across Engineering, Architecture, Infrastructure, Security, and Global Operations to advance platform stability and operational maturity.
WHAT YOU’LL BRING TO ALCON:
Bachelor’s Degree or Equivalent years of directly related experience (or high school +13 yrs; Assoc.+9 yrs; M.S.+2 yrs; PhD+0 yrs)
The ability to fluently read, write, understand and communicate in English
5 Years of Relevant Experience
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:
- Bachelor’s Degree in degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (Master’s preferred)
- Experience in Production Operations, Site Reliability Engineering, Platform Engineering, or Cloud Operations
- Experience supporting regulated healthcare or medical device platforms
- AWS Solutions Architect or DevOps Professional certification
- Kubernetes (CKA/CKS) certification
- Experience with healthcare interoperability standards (HL7, FHIR, DICOM)
- Experience implementing Site Reliability Engineering practices within large-scale cloud environments
- AWS (EKS, EC2, RDS, S3, Route53, IAM, Load Balancers, CloudWatch)
- Kubernetes, Istio, Docker
- Datadog, APM, logging, distributed tracing, synthetic monitoring
- CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, automation
- HIPAA, GDPR, FDA compliance
- Strong understanding of cloud networking, security, and high-availability architectures
HOW YOU CAN THRIVE AT ALCON:
- Benefit from working in a highly collaborative environment.
- Join Alcon’s mission to provide top-tier, innovative products to enhance sight, enhance lives, and grow your career.
- Alcon provides robust benefits package including health, life, retirement, PTO, and much more!
Alcon Careers
See your impact at alcon.com/careers
ATTENTION: Current Alcon Employee/Contingent Worker
If you are currently an active employee/contingent worker at Alcon, please click the appropriate link below to apply on the Internal Career site.
Find Jobs for Employees
Find Jobs for Contingent Worker
Compensation and Benefits
Alcon’s Total Rewards programs are designed to align incentives with business objectives, support our values, and deliver long‑term value. Our compensation approach includes a combination of fixed and variable pay, with short‑term and long‑term incentive opportunities for eligible roles. Our benefits offerings are designed to support associates and their families across key life events, including programs that promote health and well‑being, provide financial security, and support retirement planning.
The salary range posted represents the anticipated hiring range for this role. Actual compensation may vary based on factors such as experience, skills, location, and internal equity, and may fall outside the posted range.
Pay Range
140,250.00 - 181,500.00
Pay Frequency
Annual
Alcon is an Equal Opportunity Employer and participates in E-Verify. Alcon takes pride in maintaining a diverse environment and our policies are not to discriminate in recruitment, hiring, training, promotion or other employment practices for reasons of race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital or veteran status, disability, or any other legally protected status. Alcon is also committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodation to individuals with disabilities. If, because of a medical condition or disability, you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the application process, or in order to perform the essential functions of a position, please send an email to alcon.recruitment@alcon.com and let us know the nature of your request and your contact information.
See All 26 Production Engineering Manager Jobs in California
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Find JobsProduction Engineering Manager Jobs by City in California
Where California roles are concentrated, by current openings.
Production Engineering Manager Job Market in California
A snapshot from current California openings, updated as new roles post.
Who's Hiring
Top Industries Hiring
- Technology & Software
- Manufacturing
- Electronics & Hardware
- Government & Public Sector
What California Employers Look For
The qualifications that appear most often in production engineering manager jobs across California.
- Bachelor's degree in mechanical, industrial, or manufacturing engineering from an accredited program
- Five or more years of production or process engineering experience in a California regulated industry
- Demonstrated experience leading cross-functional engineering teams in a high-volume manufacturing environment
- Proficiency with lean manufacturing, Six Sigma, or Toyota Production System methodologies
- Familiarity with California OSHA Title 8 safety regulations and environmental compliance requirements
- Experience with ERP or MES platforms such as SAP, Oracle, or Siemens Opcenter
Production Engineering Manager Jobs in California: Frequently Asked Questions
How do you become a production engineering manager in California?
Most California employers expect a bachelor's degree in mechanical, industrial, or manufacturing engineering followed by several years of hands-on production or process engineering work before a move into management. While the role carries no state-issued license, engineers who hold a Professional Engineer registration from the California Board for Professional Engineers, Land Surveyors, and Geologists are preferred for senior roles in aerospace, defense, and public-sector contracts. Building experience in lean methodologies and leading a project team is the most reliable path to a first management offer.
How much do production engineering managers make in California?
Production engineering managers in California earn a median of about $210,280 a year, based on May 2025 Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data, ranging from around $137,900 for the lowest 10% to over $296,130 for the top 10%. Pay rises with experience, specialty, and employer.
Which companies hire production engineering managers in California?
Employers hiring production engineering managers in California right now include HARVEY, Alcon, and NVIDIA, based on current listings on Migrate Mate as of August 2026. California's concentration of semiconductor fabs, aerospace primes, and medical device manufacturers means openings appear consistently across both large corporations and mid-size contract manufacturers throughout the state.
Which California cities have the most production engineering manager jobs?
San Francisco, Santa Clara, and Costa Mesa have the most production engineering manager openings in California. The Bay Area leads because of its dense cluster of semiconductor and advanced electronics manufacturers, Los Angeles draws from its large aerospace and defense prime contractor base, and San Diego's strength in medical devices and defense systems sustains consistent demand even outside the two largest metros.
Are there remote production engineering manager jobs in California?
Yes, but they're rare. About 54% of production engineering manager openings tied to California are remote or hybrid as of August 2026, reflecting that the role is fundamentally tied to physical production floors and equipment. The portions of the job most likely to be done remotely are planning, reporting, vendor coordination, and cross-site program management rather than direct floor oversight.
How can I get hired as a production engineering manager in California with little or no experience?
The most realistic entry path is moving into a senior individual-contributor production or process engineer role first, then stepping into team lead or program lead assignments before applying for manager titles. Large California manufacturers like Lam Research, Edwards Lifesciences, and Raytheon run rotational engineering programs and new-graduate associate engineer tracks that place candidates on production teams. Building a record of leading a kaizen event, a yield improvement project, or a capital equipment qualification gives hiring managers concrete evidence of management readiness without a formal title.
Where can I find and apply to production engineering manager jobs in California?
You can find and apply to production engineering manager jobs in California on Migrate Mate, which lists current California openings updated regularly. Search the available roles, find the ones that match your experience and location, and apply directly to the ones that fit.
See All 26 Production Engineering Manager Jobs in California
Find roles in California that match your experience and apply in just a few clicks.
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