Neural AI
Lead Defense Engineer
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RTX
Lockheed Martin
Northrop Grumman
Anduril
General Dynamics
BAE Systems
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The job description
Tech stack. Agile technical leadership, systems integration, design reviews, sprint planning, mentoring, risk and schedule management, MATLAB, Python
About the role
You will join a defense technology company as the technical lead of a small engineering team delivering a mission subsystem, accountable for both the design quality and the delivery date. You set the technical direction, keep work flowing through clear priorities and honest planning, and stay hands-on enough to unblock the hardest integration problems yourself. Your team ships because you make the path clear, remove what stands in the way, and hold a quality bar that earns the trust of program leadership and adjacent teams.
What you will achieve
- Lead a team of 4 to 7 engineers to deliver a subsystem through design, integration, and test on the program schedule.
- Run effective sprint planning and reviews that keep committed work above 90 percent completion without burning out the team.
- Own the team's technical quality bar, with design reviews that catch issues early and a defect escape rate trending down quarter over quarter.
- Unblock the hardest integration problems personally, pairing with engineers until the root cause is found and fixed.
- Grow every team member through regular feedback, stretch assignments, and honest conversations about their development.
What you will bring
Must-haves
- You bring 7 or more years of defense or aerospace engineering experience, including prior technical leadership of engineers.
- You have delivered hardware or software through integration and test, and you know where programs actually slip.
- You plan and track engineering work credibly: scope, dependencies, risks, and schedule tradeoffs.
- You stay technically hands-on, contributing to design, analysis, or debugging at the level your team respects.
- You give direct, constructive feedback and handle performance conversations without avoiding them.
- You coordinate across teams and with program management so your team is never surprised by shifting priorities.
- You have managed technical risk and schedule risk together, making explicit tradeoffs when the two conflict.
Nice-to-haves
- You have hired and built an engineering team from a small core.
- You bring experience with earned value or other program performance tracking.
- You have led a team through a major design review or qualification campaign.
- You are eligible for a U.S. security clearance.
- You bring experience with subcontractor technical management or supplier oversight.