Chief Engineer, Air Vehicle Lead - MMA
Seattle · San Diego · USD 250,000-340,000 / year · 15+ years experience · Onsite · Posted Oct 6, 2026
At a glance
- Experience
- 15+ years experience
- Workplace
- Onsite
- Location
- Seattle · San Diego
- Salary
- USD 250,000-340,000 / year
About the role
- As the Air Vehicle Lead for our new Air Force MMA program, you will serve as the senior technical leader responsible for the design, development, integration, and maturation of the air vehicle.
- This is a highly technical, hands-on leadership role where you will work across aerodynamics, flight sciences, structures, mechanical systems, propulsion, avionics, electrical systems, flight controls, manufacturing, and test to ensure the aircraft performs as an integrated system.
Responsibilities
- Serve as the technical leader for the aircraft, with responsibility for overall vehicle architecture, technical performance, integration, and design integrity throughout the development lifecycle.
- Provide technical direction across aerodynamics and flight sciences, structures, mechanical systems, propulsion, avionics, electrical systems, flight controls, and other air vehicle disciplines.
- Lead first-principles engineering trades across performance, weight, range, payload, cost, reliability, manufacturability, schedule, and technical risk.
- Drive the aircraft from requirements and conceptual design through preliminary and critical design, hardware release, build, integration, ground test, and flight test.
- Remain deeply engaged in the engineering work by participating directly in design reviews, technical problem solving, root-cause investigations, test activities, and critical design decisions.
- Identify the technical problems most likely to prevent mission success and drive them to closure while establishing appropriate engineering rigor.
- Create a rapid development environment that uses prototypes, ground testing, flight testing, and real-world data to retire risk and continuously improve the aircraft.
- Ensure interfaces between structures, propulsion, avionics, flight controls, payloads, software, and other systems are understood, controlled, and successfully integrated.
- Partner closely with Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Quality, and Operations to ensure the aircraft can transition from development into repeatable production.
- Provide technical leadership for critical suppliers and externally developed systems, ensuring supplier designs and hardware meet aircraft-level requirements and program objectives.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related engineering discipline.
- 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, and production.
- 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 systems, and vehicle integration.
- 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.
- Demonstrated track record of taking ownership of complex development efforts and delivering hardware, navigating technical challenges and development cycles to achieve program milestones.
- Ability to obtain and maintain the security clearance required for the program.
Preferred qualifications
- Master's degree or higher preferred.
