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Chief Engineer, Air Vehicle Lead - Ranger

Shield AI· X-BAT Division – X-BAT Engineering
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Seattle, WA, San Diego, CA$250k - $340kFull Time EmployeePosted 2w ago

About the role

Air Vehicle Lead for Shield AI’s Ranger program, responsible for the design, development, integration, and maturation of the air vehicle. Oversees multidisciplinary engineering to take the vehicle from requirements through production, balancing performance, risk, and producibility.

Responsibilities

  • Own the Air Vehicle: Serve as the technical leader for the aircraft, with responsibility for overall vehicle architecture, technical performance, integration, and design integrity throughout the development lifecycle.
  • Lead Multidisciplinary Engineering: Provide technical direction across aerodynamics and flight sciences, structures, mechanical systems, propulsion, avionics, electrical systems, flight controls, and other air vehicle disciplines.
  • Drive System-Level Trades: Lead first-principles engineering trades across performance, weight, range, payload, cost, reliability, manufacturability, schedule, and technical risk. Ensure subsystem decisions optimize the aircraft as a whole rather than individual components.
  • Lead Design Execution: Drive the aircraft from requirements and conceptual design through preliminary and critical design, hardware release, build, integration, ground test, and flight test. Establish clear technical priorities and rapidly resolve issues that threaten program execution.
  • Stay Hands-On: Remain deeply engaged in the engineering work. Participate directly in design reviews, technical problem solving, root-cause investigations, test activities, and critical design decisions.
  • Own Technical Risk: Identify the technical problems most likely to prevent mission success and drive them to closure. Establish appropriate engineering rigor while balancing analysis, test, schedule, and speed.
  • Build-Test-Learn: Create a rapid development environment that uses prototypes, ground testing, flight testing, and real-world data to retire risk and continuously improve the aircraft.
  • Drive Integration: Ensure interfaces between structures, propulsion, avionics, flight controls, payloads, software, and other systems are understood, controlled, and successfully integrated.
  • Design for Production: Partner closely with Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Quality, and Operations to ensure the aircraft can transition from development into repeatable production. Drive designs that balance performance with producibility, cost, reliability, and maintainability.
  • Lead Suppliers and Partners: Provide technical leadership for critical suppliers and externally developed systems, ensuring supplier designs and hardware meet aircraft-level requirements and program objectives.
  • Set the Engineering Standard: Establish a culture of technical ownership, first-principles thinking, urgency, disciplined engineering judgment, and accountability. Mentor engineers and technical leaders while raising the overall technical capability of the program.

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related engineering discipline; Master's degree or higher preferred.
  • 15+ years of relevant aircraft development experience, including significant technical leadership on complex aerospace programs.
  • Experience leading the development of an air vehicle or major aircraft system through multiple development lifecycle phases (design, build, integration, ground test, flight test, production).
  • Broad technical understanding across aerodynamics, structures, propulsion, flight controls, avionics, mechanical systems, and vehicle integration.
  • Hands-on technical leadership with strong system-level perspective.
  • Proven ability to make difficult technical decisions with incomplete information, identify high-value risks, and drive teams to fast solutions.
  • Strong understanding of aircraft design principles, system integration, verification/validation, and aircraft-level performance.
  • Experience partnering with manufacturing and suppliers to transition hardware from development into production.
  • Track record of owning complex development efforts and delivering hardware to meet milestones.
  • Ability to obtain and maintain security clearance.

Skills

Required:Air vehicle development leadershipSystems engineeringDesign for productionRisk management
Last updated Oct 23, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Shield AI

Autonomy for the world.

Our mission is to protect service members and civilians with intelligent systems.

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