Lead eVTOL Engineer

About the role

You will join an eVTOL aircraft company to lead a small team of engineers through the design, build, and test of a major vehicle subsystem. This role blends deep technical contribution with people leadership: you will still do the hardest analysis yourself while making four to eight engineers more effective than they would be alone. Your team will own its hardware from requirements through qualification, and you will own the schedule it ships on and the quality it ships with. You will balance hands-on technical work with the care and feeding of your team, and your success will be measured as much by the engineers you develop as by the hardware you deliver.

What you will achieve

• Lead your team through a full development cycle, from requirements to qualified hardware, hitting program milestones on schedule without quality escapes.
• Set the technical direction for your subsystem, making the architecture and supplier decisions the team executes against for the program's duration.
• Build a review culture where design flaws surface early, cutting late-stage redesigns on your subsystem to near zero.
• Grow each engineer on your team deliberately, with mentorship plans that turn mid-level contributors into independent owners of real hardware.
• Deliver your subsystem's certification evidence package complete and on time, with no findings that surprise the program or the authority. The package rests on a verification plan you own end to end, from requirements decomposition through test execution.

What you will bring

Must-haves

• 7 or more years developing aircraft, rotorcraft, or complex electromechanical hardware, with shipped products you can point to.
• Demonstrated technical leadership: leading design efforts, running reviews, or mentoring engineers, whether or not you held a formal title.
• Deep expertise in at least one eVTOL-relevant domain such as structures, propulsion, avionics, or systems engineering.
• Ability to plan and staff engineering work, breaking ambiguous goals into tasks a small team can execute in parallel.
• Strong program instincts: knowing when to push for rigor and when to accept risk to protect the schedule.
• Communication that keeps engineers, program managers, and executives aligned on status, decisions, and changes.

Nice-to-haves

• Prior formal people-management experience with performance reviews and hiring.
• Experience standing up a new team or engineering function from scratch.
• Background working with external suppliers on build-to-print or build-to-spec hardware.
• Familiarity with earned value or other program tracking methods for engineering work.