Director, Chief Engineering (R4667)

Team Leadership and Development

• Manage, mentor, and grow the team serving as project technical authorities on Hivemind Solutions projects
• Set clear expectations for ownership, decision velocity, and accountability
• Coach on cross-functional influence, executive communication, and customer-facing leadership
• Conduct performance reviews and career development planning

Functional Excellence

• Establish and improve Chief Engineering standards, tools, and best practices, including in the areas of scope definition, trade management, technical risk identification and management, project execution, technical integration and problem solving
• Drive lessons learned and continuous improvement initiatives

Technical Alignment

• Ensure projects maintain a consistent system-level view through integration of project inputs from all applicable engineering disciplines including Flight Systems Integration, Test, Infrastructure, etc
• Identify interface risks, integration gaps, and technical debt early and prevent downstream churn
• Promote disciplined decision-making that considers cross-functional interdependencies
• Facilitate technical alignment through design reviews

Program Manager Partnership

• Ensure Chief Engineers actively assess the impact of technical decisions on risk, schedule, and cost
• Create clear escalation paths for cross-project technical conflicts
• Ensure technical risks are surfaced, documented, and mitigated
• Reinforce the expectation that Chief Engineers proactively steer projects
• Support proposal development, estimating, and resource planning, coordinating cross-discipline Engineering inputs as a single voice for Engineering to the project

Culture

• Build a collaborative culture where teams are empowered to move fast while remaining technically rigorous
• Foster a culture of accountability and continuous improvement, reinforcing extreme ownership of outcomes
• Develop a culture of integrators, listeners, organizers, motivators, and communicators
• Promote clarity in technical communication and decision rationale

Required Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience in complex technical systems (autonomy, aerospace, defense, distributed software, or similar domains)
• Prior experience as a Chief Engineer, Technical Lead, Project Engineer, or equivalent system-level authority
• Deep cross-functional understanding across software, autonomy, systems engineering, and integration
• Proven experience leading cross-functional teams of senior engineers or technical leaders