Director of Engineering (Forward Deployed Engineering)

Join Hadrian, a cutting-edge aerospace and defense startup, as the Director of Engineering for Forward Deployed Engineering. In this role, you will lead the technical outcomes of one or more programs, working directly with government and customer leadership. You will own the technical roadmap and delivery, build and lead your team, and stay hands-on with the technical aspects of the program. This is an opportunity to make a significant impact in the industrial base and work at a fast-paced, mission-driven company.

• Lead the Forward Deployed team on one or more programs, owning the technical outcomes and ensuring successful delivery.
• Develop and execute the technical roadmap for the program, making key decisions on what gets built and what does not.
• Build and lead the team, hiring and growing engineers, product managers, and designers, and setting the standard for their work.

• You have demonstrated history lead engineering and product teams and scaling a product from zero to one
• You have hired builders into ambiguous roles and gotten them productive fast
• Highly commercial technical leaders with excellent product judgement
• You have product taste. You know what’s worth building and what good looks like for the user, and you’ve shipped end to end enough times to back that up
• You are strong with external and internal executives. You have owned senior customer relationships and made commitments on behalf of a company that you then had to deliver on
• You are AI-native, and relentless about it. You use AI to compress everything from discovery to execution, you can show us concretely how it already makes you multiples faster, and you’ve rebuilt how your whole team works around it
• You are driven by the mission and the tempo. Rebuilding the industrial base matters to you, and you want to deliver at the pace our customers need
• You are hands-on technical You are just as comfortable supporting your team with technical. You are just as comfortable supporting your team with architecture and review as you are taking your own idea from design to delivery
• Founder or founding-team experience, especially if you ran customer relationships and business decisions while still building
• Background in aerospace, defense, manufacturing, or anywhere hardware, software, and operations meet
• Forward deployed or solutions leadership at a product company