Director, Chief Engineer

Position Title: Director, Chief Engineer
Requisition ID: 1847
Position Location: Fairfax, VA
Position Reports To: Executive Vice President (EVP) of Engineering
Supervises Others: No

At Trident Systems Space Electronic Systems (SES) division, we believe in the power of using strong engineering principles to drive innovation and solve complex problems. We foster a culture of rigorous engineering and continuous improvement, leveraging the full knowledge of our organization through collaborative product development processes that include design and peer reviews. We combine our expertise in space electronics with right-sized development processes to create innovative, high-performance space-based electronic systems that meet our customers' evolving needs.

We are a mission partner supporting DoD, Intelligence Community, and Civil space customers. We develop complex, radiation effects mitigated, designs that balance competing requirements in modern space programs, delivering cutting-edge solutions that enable our customers to achieve more in space.

Position Summary

Reporting directly to the EVP of Engineering, the Director, Chief Engineer serves as the primary technical authority for major space systems and advanced engineering initiatives. This role is responsible for driving the strategic technical roadmap, system architecture, integration, testing, and delivery of high-performance CPU and GPU processing platforms to meet rigorous technical, cost, and schedule commitments.

Providing director-level technical governance, this position ensures seamless alignment across product strategy, high-density edge computing architectures, and enterprise engineering standards. Success in this role is reflected in predictable executive-level engineering execution, proactive risk management, cross-functional organizational alignment, and the delivery of fully verified, radiation-mitigated computing solutions that solve our customers’ most complex space processing challenges.

Duties and Responsibilities

• Executive Technical Leadership: Serve as the chief technical authority and primary liaison for engineering technical execution, driving architectural decisions for mission-critical CPU and GPU space processing platforms.
• Architecture & System Governance: Lead the development of requirements, system integration strategies, and verification methodologies tailored for advanced heterogeneous computing, GPU acceleration, and multi-core CPU architectures.
• Risk & Lifecycle Management: Proactively identify, manage, and mitigate complex technical risks and design issues, ensuring actionable, enterprise-aligned resolution plans.
• Customer & Milestone Reviews: Direct customer-facing formal Program and System Reviews, including System Requirement Reviews (SRR), Preliminary Design Reviews (PDR), and Critical Design Reviews (CDR).
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with engineering functional directors and leads on resource allocation, technical standards, and process maturation to ensure engineering execution directly aligns with overall cost, schedule, and mission objectives.
• Executive Communication: Provide transparent, strategic technical status and risk reporting to the EVP of Engineering, executive leadership, board-level stakeholders, and key customer partners.
• Travel: Ability to support domestic travel or off-site technical integration activities as required.
• Other Duties: Perform other executive technical leadership duties as assigned.

Required Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline (Master’s or Ph.D. strongly preferred).
• Experience: 15+ years of relevant engineering experience (or 13+ years with an advanced degree), including 5+ years in a senior technical leadership or director-level engineering capacity.
• Industry Track Record: Proven track record of delivering complex aerospace, defense, space-qualified, or mission-critical computing hardware systems.
• Technical Depth: Extensive background in system architecture, high-performance edge computing, system integration, and verification for embedded systems.
• Executive Skills: Excellent executive communication, strategic planning, cross-functional leadership, and technical problem-solving capabilities.

Preferred Qualifications

• Processing Architectures: Deep technical expertise in high-performance CPU architectures, multi-core processing, GPU-accelerated compute pipelines, heterogeneous processing, and CUDA/GPGPU architectures adapted for space environments.
• Radiation Mitigation: Experience delivering radiation-hardened or radiation-mitigated, fault-tolerant CPU and GPU hardware/software architectures for space platforms.
• Cybersecurity & Software: Direct experience with secure boot, hardware-rooted trust, cryptography, and hardened operating systems (RTOS/Linux) on modern CPU/GPU platforms.
• High-Reliability Manufacturing: Experience supporting transition-to-production and high-reliability/high-rate manufacturing operations for space electronics.

Pay Information

Full-Time Salary Range: $155,000.00 - $285,000.00 Annually

Please Note: Actual compensation offered will be determined based on several factors including, but not limited to, relevant experience, skills, education, certifications, internal equity, business considerations, and geographic location where applicable.

Benefits 

Hired applicants may be eligible for benefits including but not limited to:

• Health benefits
  • Medical 
  • Dental 
  • Vision
  • Basic life with AD&D
  • Short term disability
  • Long term disability
  • Ancillary (Voluntary life with AD&D, accident, critical illness, hospital, and pet)
  • Spending accounts (HSA, FSA, and DCFSA)
• Paid time off
• Holidays
• 401(k) (including company match)
• Tuition reimbursement
• Leaves (Parental, maternity, and military)
• Annual discretionary bonus (for eligible roles)

Trident Systems reserves the right to change or assign other duties to this position. 

Trident Solutions is an affirmative action and equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. To request reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, please contact recruiting@tridsys.com.

Pay Transparency: The contractor will not discharge or in any other manner discriminate against employees or applicants because they have inquired about, discussed, or disclosed their own pay or the pay of another employee or applicant. However, employees who have access to the compensation information of other employees or applicants as a part of their essential job functions cannot disclose the pay of other employees or applicants to individuals who do not otherwise have access to compensation information, unless the disclosure is (a) in response to a formal complaint or charge, (b) in furtherance of an investigation, proceeding, hearing, or action, including an investigation conducted by the employer, or (c) consistent with the contractor’s legal duty to furnish information. 41 CFR 60-1.35(c)