Air Vehicle Lead, Chief Engineer

Job description

Job responsibilities

• Own the Air Vehicle: Serve as the technical leader for the aircraft, with responsibility for overall vehicle architecture, technical performance, integration, and design integrity throughout the development lifecycle.
• Lead Multidisciplinary Engineering: Provide technical direction across aerodynamics and flight sciences, structures, mechanical systems, propulsion, avionics, electrical systems, flight controls, and other air vehicle…
• Drive System-Level Trades: Lead first-principles engineering trades across performance, weight, range, payload, cost, reliability, manufacturability, schedule, and technical risk.
• Lead Design Execution: Drive the aircraft from requirements and conceptual design through preliminary and critical design, hardware release, build, integration, ground test, and flight test.
• Stay Hands-On: Remain deeply engaged in the engineering work. Participate directly in design reviews, technical problem solving, root-cause investigations, test activities, and critical design decisions.
• Own Technical Risk: Identify the technical problems most likely to prevent mission success and drive them to closure. Establish appropriate engineering rigor while balancing analysis, test, schedule, and speed.
• Build-Test-Learn: Create a rapid development environment that uses prototypes, ground testing, flight testing, and real-world data to retire risk and continuously improve the aircraft.
• Drive Integration: Ensure interfaces between structures, propulsion, avionics, flight controls, payloads, software, and other systems are understood, controlled, and successfully integrated.

Job requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related engineering discipline. Master's degree or higher preferred.
• 15+ years of relevant aircraft development experience , including significant technical leadership responsibility on complex aerospace programs.
• Demonstrated experience leading the development of an air vehicle or major aircraft system through multiple phases of the development lifecycle , ideally including design, build, integration, ground test, flight test,…
• Broad technical understanding of aircraft development with demonstrated ability to make informed trades across multiple disciplines such as aerodynamics, structures, propulsion, flight controls, avionics, mechanical…
• Proven ability to operate as a hands-on technical leader , diving deeply into engineering problems while simultaneously maintaining system-level perspective.
• Demonstrated record of making difficult technical decisions with incomplete information, identifying the highest-value risks, and driving teams toward solutions at speed.
• Strong understanding of aircraft design principles, system integration, verification and validation, and the relationship between engineering decisions and aircraft-level performance.
• Experience partnering closely with manufacturing and suppliers to transition complex aerospace hardware from development into production.