Senior Engineering Manager

Job Summary

The Senior Engineering Manager is responsible for translating company strategy into effective engineering execution. This role ensures strong technical rigor, predictable delivery, disciplined resource management, and a healthy engineering culture while developing mid-level managers and technical leaders.

Key Characteristics

Engineering Execution and Delivery

• Ability to ensure engineering projects are delivered on time, within budget, and to quality requirements.
• Translates strategic objectives into clear priorities, milestones, and execution plans.
• Identifies risks early and drives mitigation before they impact cost, schedule, or performance.

Technical Leadership and Rigor

• Demonstrates deep technical judgment and the ability to set standards for sound engineering practice.
• Ensures designs, processes, and changes meet internal, customer, and regulatory requirements.
• Promotes data-driven decision making and continuous technical improvement.

People & Team Leadership

• Effectively leads and develops engineering managers and technical staff.
• Creates clarify around roles, expectations, and accountability.
• Builds trust, psychological safety, and professional respect across the engineering organization.

Communication & Stakeholder Alignment

• Clearly communicates status, risks, and priorities to executive leadership and cross-functional partners.
• Ensures leadership has timely, accurate visibility into engineering performance and issues.
• Represents engineering effectively in cross-functional and customer-facing discussions.

Resource and Capacity Management

• Manages engineering staffing, workload balance, and prioritization to maximize impact.
• Makes tradeoff decisions when resources are constrained and escalates appropriately.
• Ensures effective use of budget, tools, and engineering assets.

Process, Metrics & Continuous Improvement

• Establishes and uses KPIs to monitor productivity, quality, and delivery performance.
• Improves engineering workflows, review, and governance to increase predictability and efficiency.
• Ensures lessons learned are captured and applied across teams.

Talent Development & Succession

• Attracts, retains, and develops high-performing engineering talent.
• Conducts performance reviews and creates meaningful development plans.
• Builds bench strength for future technical and leadership roles.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree in the field of Chemistry, Physics, Engineering, or other relevant field is required. Advanced technical or business degree is highly desirable.
• 10 years of engineering experience in production or defense industries.
• Strong foundation in engineering theory and practice, with the ability to apply first principles, data-driven analysis, and sound technical judgment to guide design decisions, troubleshoot complex problems, and challenge assumptions across multiple engineering disciplines.
• Proven people and execution leadership, including experience managing managers, setting clear priorities and accountability, communicating status and risks effectively to leadership, and consistently delivering results through delegation and team development.
• Must be authorized to work in the U.S.

Competencies

• Demonstrate ability in the client's competencies as a senior leader: timely/quality decisions, delegation, develops direct reports, process management, innovation management, business acumen, intellectual horsepower, learning on the fly, hiring and staffing.

Work Hours

• 4/10 workweek