Chief Engineer
Innovative Defense Technologies

Job Info

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Description

Background Information:

Innovative Defense Technologies (IDT), provider of automated software testing, data analysis, and cybersecurity solutions for complex, mission-critical systems in the US Department of Defense (DOD), is seeking a Chief Engineer to be based in our Arlington, VA office.

Overview:

IDT's Warfare Systems Business Area (BA) is responsible for building and enabling the Navy's next generation of tactical warfare and weapons systems. As the nation enters a new era of warfare, the Warfare Systems group will be responsible for enabling and accelerating the tactical capability that is delivered to the warfighter. A Warfare Systems Chief Engineer is responsible for leading technical teams towards this vision while guiding our Navy customers through tactically relevant and technically innovative solutions to ensure the highest impact to the Fleet. This role will require a mindset of innovation to apply unlikely and cutting-edge technical solutions to some of the Navy's most complex technical problems.

Our Chief Engineer will lead multiple Technical Leads to deliver highly technical solutions within cost, schedule, and technical performance baselines. The main role of the Chief Engineer is to elicit customer requirements for disparate software development teams, create project teams to build customer solutions, and verify project performance for all relevant projects. The Chief Engineer support Program Management and Business Area leadership across all IDT functions, to include contracts, finance, engineering, and business leadership, to ensure projects perform properly and adhere to corporate processes.

Responsibilities include eliciting user requirements, reviewing requirements documentation, coordinating product team delivery schedules across projects, and validating successful solution deployments. The Chief Engineer is also responsible for reviewing project schedules and cost baselines. Using earned value and Agile metrics, the Chief Engineer will make changes across their projects to ensure all projects in their portfolio are delivered within cost, schedule, and technical baselines. The ideal candidate has experience performing across all elements of the software development life cycle (SDLC) from preliminary system analysis to test and deployment.

The Chief Engineer is also responsible for identifying new business opportunities within their portfolio, developing technical solutions to meet opportunity requirements, and providing effort and schedule estimates for new business opportunities.

All applicants must be able to obtain/maintain an active U.S. Security Clearance.

Responsibilities Include:

• Interact with customers to elicit, refine, and document technical requirements
• Interact with business area executive leadership on project performance for all projects in portfolio
• Lead multiple project teams to deliver all within cost, schedule, and technical performance baselines
• Conduct technical demonstrations and presentations for customer review and feedback
• Design review of software components ensuring integrated components meet customer requirements.
• Lead software deployment to Kubernetes-based container orchestration platforms
• Lead lab-based test and integration activities at IDT in Arlington, Virginia or Mount Laurel, NJ
• Solve resource and technical problems naturally arising in projects within portfolio
• Ensure projects in portfolio adhere to corporate processes
• Support Program Management to monitor cost, schedule, and technical performance baselines for all projects in portfolio, adjusting individual projects as needed
• Review software architectures including hardware and software interfaces
• Identify and present business area portfolio market needs to product teams, ensuring products best align with portfolio market needs
• Technical interaction with customers at a variety of remote sites

Minimum Required Qualifications:

• Minimum 15 years' experience in software engineering with 5 years' experience leading technical projects
• B.S. in software engineering, computer science, or related field

Required skills:

• Highly adept at understanding and presenting complex software solutions
• Prior experience developing software in various languages, including C, C++, Java, JavaScript, and Python.
• Abundant experience with System and Software architectures
• Familiarity with and hands on experience with software design patterns
• Experience designing software with UML primitives: sequence diagrams, class diagrams, and activity diagrams
• Requirements elicitation, management, tracking, and auditing
• Ability to work on-site in Arlington, VA facility and travel to customer sites
• Familiarity deploying containers to Docker utilizing Kubernetes based orchestration platform(s)
• Strong verbal and written communication skills; Adept at presenting technical information to internal and external stakeholders
• Project management skills to include cost, schedule, as well as technical performance estimating and measurement

Preferred skills:

• Earned Value Management (EVM) project execution and adjustments
• Familiarity with foundational networking concepts such as routing, switching, identity services, intrusion detection, and firewall
• Familiarity deploying virtual machines in VMWare vSphere environments including networking configuration
• General familiarity with Risk Management Framework (RMF), Authority to Operate (ATO) operations and experience developing solutions that adhere to cyber policy
• Familiarity designing within complex software development environments including submodules, remote dependencies, and mixed-code deployments
• Familiarity with combat system weapons control
• Relevant experience building and deploying Cloud Native solutions to Commercial Cloud Platforms, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and/or Oracle Cloud
• Experience in technical writing, including proposal and white paper authoring

Competencies:

• A strong sense of ownership, urgency, and drive with the ability to distill vague and complex requirements into meaningful technical solutions
• Exceptional communication skills. The successful candidate will listen to customer problems, identify root causes, elicit initial requirements, and continuously validate requirements throughout solution implementation
• Interdisciplinary experience. The successful candidate will interact with product management, project management, engineering, finance, and contracts organizations to execute projects and will need a rudimentary understanding of each of these areas
• Strong organization, planning, and communication skills. The successful candidate will need to develop a plan of action, a team to complete the plan, and communicate the plan up and down the organization
• Ability to work closely with Senior Leadership, Program Managers, and peer Engineers to document, manage and communicate systems and software requirements
• Solid analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to help others navigate ambiguous situations
• Excellence in technical communication with peers and non-technical cohorts
• Initiative, creativity, reliability, teamwork
• Ability to lead concurrent assignments and determine the need for changing priorities, feeding back to engineering leadership

EEO Statement:

IDT is an Equal Opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, protected Veteran status, or any other basis protected by federal, state, or local law.

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