President
Electric Boat Education: Bachelor’s degree in business administration, University of Michigan; MBA, University
of Michigan Age: 59
Electric Boat is targeting 1,000 hires annually for next 3 years at its Groton shipyard. The company bought Waterford’s Crystal Mall for $30M+ to convert into engineering and training hub as it works on Columbia-class submarines.
When Mark Rayha took the reins as Electric Boat’s president in December 2024, the Groton submarine builder was in a rare hiring lull, pausing its recent rapid growth to allow its supply chain to catch up with the yard’s progress.
A year later, the picture is very different.
“We’re full blast on hiring again,” Rayha said during a November interview with the Hartford Business Journal. “We’re looking to probably add 300 to 400 for the end of the year.”
After that, he said, the goal is 1,000 hires annually for the next three years just at the Groton yard, with the aim of taking the total workforce past 30,000 eventually.
That hiring — needed to support assembly and testing of the first Columbia-class submarine while also fulfilling the ongoing Virginia class program — has put heavy pressure on the company’s waterfront shipyard, prompting EB to embark on a property-acquisition spree.
The marquee event in 2025 was the purchase of the largely vacant Crystal Mall in Waterford for more than $30 million. The 780,000-square-foot complex is slated to be redeveloped into an engineering, training and software support hub.
“Waterfront land is such a premium, we were looking for an opportunity to take any administrative functions that are important, but not necessary to be in the shipyard, and get them off-site,” Rayha said.
To that end, the company will continue managing the mall into 2026, winding down leases for the roughly 25 remaining stores and converting the building into office and lab space. Rayha said they may keep the existing food court to serve employees who will work at the site.
“We want to be able to do that because I think the opportunity to have almost a full-service campus for our employees there is attractive to us,” he said. “One of the things we’re trying to work on, because we’re growing pretty rapidly, is really trying to pay attention to the employee experience.”
EB President Mark Rayha at an October press conference announcing the purchase of the Crystal Mall in Waterford. HBJ Photo | Harriet Jones
The renovation, which may run through 2027, will retain the building’s basic layout. Rayha said the work will be done in phases, with employees beginning to move in as each section is completed.
“There’s a lot of good natural light in the center corridor, so we don’t intend to change that. What we’ll do is we’ll modify the stores to make them into office spaces and labs,” he said.
The mall acquisition capped off a year of property expansions. The push began in January when EB acquired a 55-acre property in North Stonington with plans to build a 480,000-square-foot warehouse.
Rayha said the site’s location just off I-95 makes it an ideal hub for warehousing, quality inspection, and shipping and receiving — functions that will support parts bound for either Groton or EB’s Quonset Point yard in Rhode Island. The facility is meant to address a shortage of warehouse space and reduce truck traffic at the Groton waterfront.
EB is also focused on creating more employee parking as the waterfront workforce grows. It spent $5 million this year to acquire three parcels of land adjacent to the yard on Thames Street in Groton.
Managing the supply chain
All of this activity rests in part on Rayha and his team delivering on a program that has faced major delays and cost overruns. They are working to complete the first submarine in the new Columbia class, a project being built jointly with Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia.
The Navy intends to build 12 Columbia class boats as a replacement for its aging Ohio class fleet. It has set the total price tag at around $126 billion. The first sub, USS District of Columbia, is currently more than a year behind schedule, another of the huge challenges Rayha has been tasked with solving this year.
“We took a very aggressive approach,” he said, adding the shipyard’s process has been completely reorganized. “We put a senior leader in charge of the lead ship delivery. We have directors on the floor with the modules, both engineering directors and operations directors. We started putting shipbuilders down with Newport News, we increased our presence at suppliers.”
He set a goal of bringing all the District of Columbia’s modules to Groton by year’s end and said they are on track to meet it — progress he hopes will ease concerns within the Navy and General Dynamics’ senior leadership about ongoing cost overruns.
He said delays are due in part to the Columbia class being the first submarine designed in 3D digital models instead of 2D drawings, a change that has posed a steep learning curve for the yard’s young workforce.
“The planners that we’re hiring are learning,” he said. “Not only are they learning how to issue the design and do the planning work, they’re learning how a ship goes together more generally.”
On the supply chain issues that have caused so much angst in recent years, Rayha says he’s seeing improvement in some areas, particularly as federal and state money is utilized by companies to implement technological advances like additive manufacturing.
However, he says there’s work to be done to diversify the supply base, particularly in areas where the yard is still relying on one company for a critical part — he cites a recent fire at a supply chain company as a wake-up call on that issue.
Housing needs
Rayha is also seeking outside support as hiring accelerates, particularly around the challenge of workforce housing. He said he has had productive discussions with state officials and leaders in Waterford and New London about the need for more housing in southeastern Connecticut.
Waterford is currently weighing a new access route to the Crystal Mall, a move that could improve connectivity and potentially open adjacent land for housing development.
Overall, Rayha says his first year in the job has flown by.
“I’m having a good time,” he said. “I won’t say it’s easy, but I’m having a great time doing it.”
He points particularly to the team around him as a source of strength in challenging times.
“If you’re having a rough day, you walk through the shipyard, you talk to shipbuilders, you talk to especially young shipbuilders that are learning, and they’re so excited, and they want to show you what they’ve done,” he said. “The excitement that’s building here is tangible. And so, being able to be part of that — it’s energizing.”
