Director, Features System Engineering

Job description

Job responsibilities

• Own Merlin’s feature systems engineering development roadmap, strategy, processes, and standards, and evolve them as the program moves from early development toward certification.Lead and manage systems engineering…
• Set the technical direction for concepts of operation, functional and physical system architecture, and system interfaces across Merlin products, and personally own the most critical architecture decisions.
• Define the features, functions, and autonomous behaviors that each sub-system must execute, and ensure they trace cleanly to system-level requirements and the safety case.
• Lead the Safety, Security and Human factors teams to keep them at the forefront of architecture and requirements decisions without slowing the pace of development.
• Partner closely with Core Architecture and Chief engineer organizations to drive engineering strategy and execution.
• Represent Merlin’s systems engineering artifacts, including requirements, architecture, and interface definitions, in reviews with customers, suppliers, and regulatory authorities.
• Build, hire, and develop the systems engineering team, setting clear expectations, mentoring technical leads, and growing the bench as the company scales.
• Collaborate with executive leadership, program leads, and engineering functions to prioritize systems engineering work and communicate technical risk, status, and tradeoffs clearly.

Job requirements

• BS in Electrical, Aerospace, Systems Engineering, or a related field; MS or PhD preferred.
• 15+ years of systems engineering experience (10+ with an MS, 8+ with a PhD), including at least 4 years being a manager of System engineering managers
• Specific experience in Mission Autonomy and Vehicle Autonomy development, including aspects of AI in autonomy system engineering
• Demonstrated ability to define system-level requirements, architecture, and interfaces, and to drive the teams on requirements validation and verification through to system-level confidence.
• Proven record of solving complex architectural and systems engineering problems on new product development programs.
• Experience working in an early stage R&D department on safety-critical systems or sub-systems, with sound judgment about when to move fast and when to hold the line.
• Experience with requirements management tools and processes best practices and with establishing them for a growing team.
• Hands-on experience certifying avionics equipment using ARP4754A and RTCA DO-178B/C and DO-254 for safety-critical systems.