Head of Vehicle Engineering

As Director of Vehicle Engineering at Millennium Space Systems, you will inspire, coordinate, and lead the vehicle engineering team to deliver technical work products, schedules, and budgets. The director is the advocate for the functional engineering team to ensure they have the required resources to exceed customer expectations. You will work with other directors and the VP of engineering as a team representing the company's engineering leaders. You will develop and sustain a vision for continued growth and improved efficiency for the vehicle engineering team.

The vehicle engineering teams own design integration, vehicle performance, and subsystem program execution for scope across mechanical, thermal, structural, harness, propulsion, and mechanical ground support engineering teams.

Key responsibilities:

• Communication with Engineering Teams: Provide overall company happenings and context, explain situations in context of the employee, the team, and Millennium, provide rationale and background for higher-level decisions, set technical direction and standards for mechanical, thermal, structural, harness, propulsion, and mechanical ground support engineering teams.
• Establish and maintain standardization of project management tools to drive commonality in design implementation.
• Establish Objectives and KPIs that align with company goals and measure engineering performance across the organization.
• Implement organizational initiatives and corrective actions to meet and improve upon performance targets.
• Coordinate risk management across teams, escalate and prioritize critical risks, oversee program-level schedules, ensure resource balancing, and approve staffing plans.
• Review and approve proposal labor estimates and technical baselines, manage bid efforts, and communicate with program directors and PMs regarding technical work products and performance.
• Collaborate with Quality and Safety teams to ensure risk posture is well understood and standards are up to date.
• Work with Manufacturing leadership teams to provide support in designing for manufacturability and resolution of complex non-conformance resolution.
• Look for cross-team relationships and help set priorities on what team managers recommend.
• Approve tools/software for efficient use across engineering teams, manage associated costs, and manage OH budget across engineering teams.
• Mentor and perform performance reviews of front-line managers and direct reports, provide regular 1:1 meetings, formal feedback, and raise requests per company guidelines.
• Identify talent for Technical Fellow positions and career growth paths, sponsor cross-team initiatives to drive innovation, and identify and support transformational technologies.

Requirements:

• Minimum of 14 years of experience as an engineering professional in the aerospace and/or defense industry.
• 4 years' experience as a functional manager.
• Experience having served as or currently serving as a Project Lead and/or functional manager in spacecraft development.
• Demonstrated knowledge of satellite systems and components.
• Demonstrated ability in vehicle engineering design integration and analysis for spacecraft bus/structure products.
• Experience in structural design and analysis, thermal design and analysis, mechanical systems and mechanisms, propulsion systems, harness and cable design, and design for manufacturability and sustainment.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with iterative and/or agile development processes.
• Experience with CAD tools (NX, SolidWorks, Creo) and PLM systems (Teamcenter).
• Experience with 3D harness modeling or other integration tools.
• Experience with structural/thermal analysis tools (Nastran, Patran, Thermal Desktop).
• Experience with designing vehicles for production at scale (>100 per year).
• Experience with git, JIRA, confluence.
• Aerospace industry experience.
• National Security experience.
• Active U.S. Top Secret/SCI Security Clearance.

Salary Range: $174,500 - $260,000