Operational Excellence Lead

Location: Filton, Weymouth, or Frimley - We offer a range of hybrid and flexible working arrangements – please speak to your recruiter about the options for this particular role.

Salary: £47,271+ depending on experience

What You’ll Be Doing

• Establish and embed Operational Excellence, setting up frameworks, standards, and ways of working aligned to SQCDP and customer expectations.
• Define and deploy the OpEx strategy and improvement roadmap, translating strategic intent into clear goals, priorities, and delivery plans.
• Translate strategy into executable improvement plans, flowing objectives into owned, measurable team and project-level actions.
• Lead and govern OpEx programme delivery, ensuring improvement projects are prioritised, planned, and successfully delivered.
• Drive KPI-led performance improvement, identifying priority improvement areas and measuring benefits across SQCDP metrics.
• Build OpEx capability through mentorship and coaching, leading a small team while developing sustainable continuous improvement skills across the business.

Your skills and experiences

• Proven experience deploying and enacting OpEx methodologies.
• Demonstrated leadership and influence, effectively engaging teams and senior leaders.
• Actively coached and mentored others, building sustainable continuous improvement capability.
• Confident communicator and facilitator, able to engage, influence, and align diverse audiences.

Benefits

As well as a competitive pension scheme, BAE Systems also offers employee share plans, an extensive range of flexible discounted health, wellbeing and lifestyle benefits, including a green car scheme, private health plans and shopping discounts – you may also be eligible for an annual incentive.

The Integrated Combat Systems Team

The Integrated Combat Systems (ICS) team delivers multi-layered, mission-critical combat capabilities by integrating sensors, weapons, communications, and command-and-control systems. As an Operational Excellence Lead within ICS, your role will have an exciting opportunity to make a real, visible impact in a high-profile, technically demanding environment, working closely with senior leaders to improve performance across Safety, Quality, Cost, Delivery, and People while building lasting improvement capability.

We offer relocation support packages across all Submarines roles, subject to meeting eligibility criteria.

Why BAE Systems?

This is a place where you’ll be able to make a real difference. You’ll be part of an inclusive culture that values diversity of thought, rewards integrity, and merit, and where you’ll be empowered to fulfil your potential. We welcome people from all backgrounds and want to make sure that our recruitment processes are as inclusive as possible. If you have a disability or health condition (for example dyslexia, autism, an anxiety disorder etc.) that may affect your performance in certain assessment types, please speak to your recruiter about potential reasonable adjustments.

Please be aware that many roles at BAE Systems are subject to both security and export control restrictions. These restrictions mean that factors such as your nationality, any nationalities you may have previously held, and your place of birth can restrict the roles you are eligible to perform within the organisation. All applicants must at a minimum achieve Baseline Personnel Security Standard. Many roles also require higher levels of National Security Vetting where applicants must typically have 5 to 10 years of continuous residency in the UK depending on the vetting level required for the role, to allow for meaningful security vetting checks.

Closing Date: 2nd February 2026. We reserve the right to close this vacancy early if we receive sufficient applications for the role. Therefore, if you are interested, please submit your application as early as possible.