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Shield AIShield AIWashington, DC

Director, Engineering Excellence & Enablement

Strategic leader reporting to VP Engineering who builds engineering operating systems, drives excellence initiatives, establishes execution cadences, and leads cross-functional programs to improve productivity, predictability, and organizational maturity in an Aerospace & Defense technology environment. Requires 10+ years leadership experience influencing without authority.

210k – 320k/yr
On-site10+ YOETechnical Program Management

About the role

What you'll do

Engineering Strategy & Organizational Enablement

  • Partner with the VP of Engineering to translate business and product strategy into engineering capabilities, operating models, and execution plans.
  • Develop and evolve the engineering operating system, including planning processes, governance, decision-making frameworks, and organizational rhythms.
  • Identify capability gaps and recommend investments in people, processes, tooling, and organizational structure.

Engineering Excellence

  • Define and drive engineering excellence initiatives focused on developer productivity, quality, reliability, operational maturity, and continuous improvement.
  • Establish engineering effectiveness metrics and dashboards that provide visibility into organizational health, delivery performance, and engineering productivity.
  • Champion adoption of modern engineering practices, standards, and continuous improvement methodologies.

Operational Cadence & Execution

  • Establish and facilitate consistent engineering operating cadences including strategic planning, quarterly planning, roadmap reviews, engineering leadership meetings, business reviews, and operational retrospectives/after-action reviews.
  • Drive accountability for execution across engineering leadership while identifying and resolving organizational bottlenecks.
  • Improve planning accuracy, prioritization, dependency management, and execution predictability.

Enterprise Engineering Initiatives

  • Lead complex, cross-functional engineering initiatives that span multiple teams and organizations.
  • Drive strategic programs such as AI enablement, developer experience improvements, technical governance, and organizational scaling initiatives.
  • Coordinate executive communications, status reporting, risk management, and stakeholder engagement for enterprise programs.

Organizational Effectiveness

  • Partner with engineering leaders to improve organizational health, team effectiveness, and leadership maturity.
  • Standardize engineering processes where appropriate while preserving team autonomy.
  • Foster a culture of operational excellence, continuous learning, and data-informed decision making.

Required qualifications

  • 10+ years of engineering leadership, technical program management, engineering operations, or related experience.
  • Demonstrated success leading large-scale cross-functional initiatives in complex technology organizations.
  • Experience establishing engineering operating models, governance, planning processes, and execution frameworks.
  • Strong understanding of modern software engineering organizations, Agile development, DevOps, and engineering metrics in the Aerospace & Defense industry.
  • Proven ability to influence senior leaders without relying on direct authority.
  • Exceptional communication, facilitation, organizational, and executive presentation skills.
  • Strong analytical mindset with experience using data to drive organizational improvements.

Preferred qualifications

  • Experience partnering directly with VP or C-level technology executives.
  • Experience scaling engineering organizations through periods of rapid growth or transformation.
  • Familiarity with developer productivity and organizational effectiveness measurement.

Skills

engineering leadershipTechnical Program Managementengineering operationsagile developmentDevOpsengineering metricscross-functional initiativesoperating modelsgovernancedeveloper productivityai enablementorganizational scaling
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