Principal Defense Engineer

About the role

You will join a defense technology company as a principal engineer with technical authority that spans programs, the person leadership calls when a decision is expensive to reverse. Chief engineers rely on your judgment for architectures, technology bets, and engineering standards, and your influence shows up in products you never personally designed because your guidance shaped them. You operate at the intersection of technology strategy and program execution, translating long-term technical vision into roadmaps, reference architectures, and review practices the whole organization can build on.

What you will achieve

• Set the technical direction for a product family, producing an architecture and roadmap that three or more programs build against.
• Resolve the organization's hardest cross-program tradeoffs, such as commonality versus performance, with analyses that end debate and stick.
• Establish engineering standards and design practices that cut integration defects measurably across programs within two years.
• Guide capture strategy on major pursuits, shaping technical approaches that win and can actually be executed.
• Build the next generation of technical leaders by mentoring senior engineers into staff-level scope and judgment.

What you will bring

Must-haves

• You bring 12 or more years of defense engineering experience with a record of delivered systems at increasing scope.
• You have owned system or enterprise architecture decisions with consequences across multiple programs or product lines.
• You think in decades and portfolios: technology roadmaps, platform strategies, and make-versus-buy at organizational scale.
• You influence without direct authority, aligning chief engineers, program managers, and customers around a technical direction.
• You write and speak with precision, from board-level briefings to deep design reviews.
• You have a sustained record of mentoring engineers who went on to lead significant technical efforts themselves.
• You have arbitrated major technical disputes between programs or organizations, producing decisions that held up over time.

Nice-to-haves

• You have shaped industry or government technical standards.
• You bring a graduate degree in a relevant engineering discipline.
• You have led independent technical reviews or red teams for major programs.
• You hold an active security clearance at an appropriate level.
• You have published or presented influential technical work recognized beyond your own organization.