# Deputy Chief Engineer, X-BAT **Company**: Shield AI **Location**: Seattle, Washington **Work arrangement**: onsite **Experience**: senior **Job type**: Full Time Employee **Salary**: USD 250,000-350,000 per-year-salary **Category**: Engineering **Industry**: Aerospace **Apply**: https://jobs.lever.co/shieldai/3bd5b78a-225b-4a57-9ec7-ef5233d42053?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply **Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_96a18d6b-44f ## Description We are seeking an experienced aircraft-development leader to fill the role of Deputy Chief Engineer for X-BAT. As the primary technical deputy to the X-BAT Air Vehicle Lead, you will be responsible for maintaining the technical integrity of the aircraft while driving day-to-day engineering execution across multiple disciplines. Responsibilities: - Serve as the primary technical deputy to the X-BAT Air Vehicle Lead, acting on their behalf when necessary and helping translate program objectives into clear engineering priorities. - Maintain the integrity of the air vehicle's technical baseline, including system requirements, architecture, interfaces, configuration, performance, verification, and airworthiness evidence. - Lead the day-to-day integration of engineering activities across aerodynamics, structures, propulsion, mechanical systems, avionics, electrical systems, flight controls, software, autonomy, manufacturing, and test. - Drive aircraft-level technical decisions and trade studies, ensuring decisions are grounded in first-principles analysis and consider downstream effects on performance, safety, cost, schedule, producibility, maintainability, and operations. - Establish and maintain a disciplined technical-risk process, ensuring risks are identified early, assigned accountable owners, supported by mitigation plans, and retired through analysis or test. - Lead major technical and design reviews, ensuring the aircraft is sufficiently mature to progress through fabrication, ground test, flight test, qualification, and production. - Partner with Program Management to align technical scope with schedule, budget, staffing, supplier, and customer commitments. - Work closely with Manufacturing and Supply Chain to ensure designs are producible, scalable, and supported by a resilient supplier base. - Partner with Test and Flight Operations to define verification strategies, ground- and flight-test objectives, instrumentation requirements, test readiness criteria, and issue-resolution plans. - Lead rapid root-cause investigations and corrective actions for complex aircraft-level problems identified during integration, ground test, flight test, production, or operations. - Ensure technical decisions and engineering changes are documented, communicated, and reflected in the controlled product baseline. - Develop the technical leadership capabilities of engineering managers, functional leads, integrated product team leads, and senior individual contributors. - Communicate aircraft status, technical risks, decision recommendations, and recovery plans clearly to program leadership, executives, customers, and external partners. - Foster a culture of technical excellence, urgency, ownership, intellectual honesty, and constructive challenge. Required Qualifications: - Bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Systems Engineering, or a related technical discipline. - 12+ years of progressive experience developing complex aircraft, military aerospace systems, autonomous aircraft, or similarly integrated aerospace products. - Demonstrated technical leadership on an aircraft-development program, preferably as a Chief Engineer, Deputy Chief Engineer, Air Vehicle Lead, Systems Engineering Lead, Integrated Product Team Lead, or equivalent. - Broad understanding of aircraft design and integration across multiple engineering disciplines, with the technical judgment to identify critical interfaces and system-level consequences. - Experience taking an aircraft or similarly complex aerospace system through multiple lifecycle stages, such as requirements development, preliminary and critical design, fabrication, integration, ground test, flight test, qualification, or production. - Experience establishing and managing system requirements, technical baselines, interface definitions, design reviews, verification plans, and engineering risks. - Demonstrated ability to make high-quality technical decisions with incomplete information and under aggressive program timelines. - Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical issues and recommendations to executive and customer audiences. - Experience leading multidisciplinary engineering teams in a fast-paced development environment. - Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance. Preferred Qualifications: - Master's degree in Aerospace Engineering, Systems Engineering, Engineering Management, or a related discipline. - Experience developing clean-sheet military aircraft, fighter aircraft, collaborative combat aircraft, unmanned aircraft systems, or advanced VTOL platforms. - Experience with propulsion integration, flight controls, vehicle management systems, autonomy integration, low-observable aircraft, or weapons and mission-systems integration. - Experience supporting aircraft ground test, envelope expansion, developmental flight test, airworthiness, and mishap-risk reduction. - Familiarity with military airworthiness frameworks, verification and validation processes, configuration management, and model-based systems engineering. - Experience transitioning an aircraft from rapid prototype development into qualification, rate production, and operational deployment. - Experience working directly with the Department of Defense, military service customers, external suppliers, and strategic industry partners. - Background in a high-growth aerospace organization where speed, individual ownership, and first-principles thinking were essential to program success. ## Skills ### Required - Aerospace Engineering - Mechanical Engineering - Electrical Engineering - Systems Engineering - Technical Leadership - Project Management - Communication - Problem-Solving ### Nice to have - Master's degree in Aerospace Engineering - Experience with propulsion integration - Flight controls - Vehicle management systems - Autonomy integration - Low-observable aircraft - Weapons and mission-systems integration --- Source: [Apply at jobs.lever.co](https://jobs.lever.co/shieldai/3bd5b78a-225b-4a57-9ec7-ef5233d42053?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)