Lead Engineer, Air

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United Kingdom.

📋 Description

• Assume hands-on technical leadership for UFORCE’s inaugural Western-facing air product.

• Evaluate the existing design, customer needs, and test outcomes, identify potential risks, and formulate a 90-day delivery strategy.

• Define requirements, maintain configuration records, create bills of materials, establish interface definitions, and manage change control.

• Oversee systems integration across airframe, propulsion, power, avionics, flight control, communications, navigation, payload interfaces, and ground systems.

• Implement failure reporting and corrective action processes, prioritize failure modes, and validate enhancements through ground and flight testing.

• Prepare the product for consistent production by focusing on design for manufacturability, component qualification, approved substitutions, and supplier-risk management.

• Issue production documentation that includes drawings, BOM, assembly requirements, inspection and acceptance tests, along with cost-reduction priorities.

• Establish approved configurations, test plans, and readiness criteria for customer trials and delivery.

• Collaborate with Ukrainian product specialists and international teams to incorporate operator and customer feedback into product modifications.

• Identify reusable architecture, components, and engineering practices, and propose necessary capabilities and resources.

⛳️ Requirements

• Proven experience leading the delivery of a complete air vehicle or a significant integrated UAS product, demonstrating personal technical decisions and their impact on flight performance.

• Ability to reason across mechanical, electrical, flight-control, communications, navigation, and software interfaces.

• Significant involvement in transitioning an aerial product to repeatable production, which includes design for manufacturability, configuration control, and production testing.

• A history of diagnosing flight or field failures, determining root causes, and validating corrective actions through systematic testing.

• Capability to set priorities, coordinate engineers and specialized partners, and drive delivery through both influence and formal authority.

• Practical knowledge of how design choices influence availability, qualification, unit cost, manufacturing quality, and sourcing requirements.

• Understanding of GNSS denial, jamming, communications resilience, and operator feedback in UAS design and evaluation.

• Comfortable working closely with hardware, making decisions under uncertainty, and balancing delivery speed with engineering oversight.

• Ability to differentiate between demonstrated capabilities and development goals, articulate limitations, and proactively escalate technical, safety, or resource risks.

• Willingness to travel frequently to engineering teams, manufacturing sites, test ranges, and customers.

• Preferred: experience with Ukrainian UAS teams, Western defense clients, NDAA, Blue UAS, export controls, customer trials, military qualification, airworthiness, payload integration, cross-country engineering/manufacturing coordination, or broader technical leadership.

🏝️ Benefits

• Competitive salary with performance-based bonuses.

• Comprehensive health and wellness benefits.

• Opportunities for professional development and continuous learning.

• Dynamic and collaborative work environment.

• Flexible working arrangements to support work-life balance.