Lead Aerospace Engineer

About the role

You will lead a small team of aerospace engineers delivering a vehicle subsystem through an active development program. You own the technical output and the people: assignments, reviews, milestone readiness, and professional growth. This role matters because aerospace milestones are unforgiving, and your leadership determines whether your team arrives at PDR and CDR with clean, substantiated designs or with open actions and schedule slips. You will translate program milestones into weekly execution: breaking subsystem scope into owned work packages, sequencing analyses and tests against long-lead hardware, and keeping the team focused when priorities shift. Your one-on-ones will balance technical coaching with career development, because aerospace teams retain engineers who are growing. You will manage upward as deliberately as you manage downward, giving program management early warning of risks with recovery options attached, never surprises. You will protect engineering rigor under schedule pressure, knowing which corners can be cut safely and which ones become findings, failures, or worse.

What you will achieve

• Deliver your subsystem scope through PDR, CDR, and qualification on schedule, with review actions trending to zero before each milestone
• Build a team of 4 to 7 engineers with clear ownership, growth plans, and a review culture that catches errors before formal reviews
• Cut analysis and design rework by 30 percent through standardized methods, checklists, and peer review discipline
• Own staffing, priority, and escalation decisions across competing program demands while protecting team health
• Drive interface agreements with adjacent teams that eliminate late-discovered incompatibilities
• Improve team velocity and morale by instituting clear ownership, weekly technical standups, and a blameless review culture focused on catching errors early

What you will bring

Must-haves

• 7 to 10+ years of aerospace engineering experience with multiple program milestones completed
• Demonstrated technical leadership: leading design teams, running reviews, owning cross-discipline coordination
• Strong program instincts: milestone planning, risk registers, resource loading, and readiness assessments
• Deep expertise in your subsystem with working knowledge of full vehicle integration
• Ability to hire, coach, and performance-manage engineers including difficult conversations
• Calm, decisive prioritization when schedule, mass, and performance collide
• Excellent communication upward to program management and outward to customers and suppliers

Nice-to-haves

• Experience leading teams through flight test campaigns
• Knowledge of agile hardware or lean product development practices
• Background across commercial and defense aerospace environments
• Formal leadership or project management training
• Training in structured problem solving methods such as 8D or fault tree analysis