DIRECTOR, STRUCTURES AND FLIGHT SCIENCES

About the Role

As Director of Structures and Flight Sciences, you will provide strategic and technical leadership across three closely related functions: structural design and stress analysis (Design & Stress), flight sciences, and product innovation. You are responsible for the structural integrity, analytical rigor, aerodynamic insight, and innovative thinking that underpin every aircraft program AeroTEC touches. This is a senior leadership role at the intersection of deep technical authority and organizational vision — owning the direction, capability, and performance of some of the Department's most technically demanding disciplines.

In This Role You Will:

• Team Leadership & Organizational Development
• Lead an integrated, multi-disciplinary organization spanning structural design, stress analysis, flight sciences, and product innovation — building a group defined by technical excellence, accountability, and mutual respect.
• Provide direct line leadership to the Managers and Leads within the team, including: Design & Stress; Flight Sciences; and Product Innovation — establishing clear expectations, aligned priorities, and coherent ways of working across all three functions.
• Establish clear structures of delegation so that managers, group leads, and senior engineers can own daily execution, freeing you to operate strategically; hold direct reports accountable to those expectations.
• Conduct timely, constructive performance reviews and develop individualized technical and leadership growth plans for each direct report, including succession planning for key roles within the group.
• Identify capability gaps proactively across Design & Stress, Flight Sciences, and Product Innovation; recruit, develop, or partner to close them before they constrain program delivery.
• Cultivate a culture of engineering rigor across all functions — one where assumptions are challenged, analyses are defensible, innovation is encouraged, and quality is non-negotiable.
• Resource Deployment & Financial Management
• Deploy resources across Design & Stress, Flight Sciences, and Product Innovation appropriately, optimized for experience level, billing structure, and timeliness; ensure blended rates meet program proposal assumptions and objectives.
• Build team capacity or partner with external entities to ensure resources match workload across all three functions, keeping the cost basis competitive while maintaining required levels of expertise.
• Develop and manage partnerships with external structural engineering, aerodynamics, and product development firms to provide surge capacity and cost-competitive support.
• Oversee Earned Value Management (EVM) discipline within the group — ensuring managers apply EVM principles to plan, baseline, measure, forecast, and recover work; review variance analyses and corrective action plans.
• Support and adhere to fiscal controls; contribute to proposal development as a Subject Matter Expert across structural, flight sciences, and product innovation scope as appropriate.
• Continuously monitor utilization rates across all three functions; smooth resource loading across programs and departments to maximize revenue capture.
• Technical Leadership & Program Oversight
• Set the technical and methodological direction for structural design and stress analysis, including adoption of modern tools, FEA methods, damage tolerance and fatigue approaches, composite analysis techniques, and certification strategies.
• Set the technical direction for the flight sciences discipline: aerodynamics and performance, stability and control / handling qualities, flight and ground loads development, aeroelasticity and flutter, and mass properties / weight and balance.
• Set the technical direction for product innovation: mechanical design, wind tunnel model development, prototype-to-delivery workflows, and design-for-certification approaches for novel aerospace products.
• Ensure work products across all three functions are developed to plan; intervene and course-correct at a leadership level — not by becoming the individual analyst or designer.
• Drive consistency and quality in certification deliverables across the group: structural substantiation reports, DER-signed packages, compliance matrices, loads reports, and flight test plans.
• Oversee Material Review Board (MRB) support for Design & Stress, ensuring stress and design dispositions for non-conforming hardware are technically sound and timely.
• Champion innovation within the Product Innovation function — fostering concept ideation, creative problem-solving, and lean continuous improvement as a deliberate organizational capability.
• Cross-Functional & Strategic Leadership
• Operate as a senior leader within the Engineering Department, collaborating with Mechanical Systems, Aircraft Systems, Systems Engineering & Certification, Test & Evaluation, and Program Management to deliver integrated solutions.
• Act as solution architect for customer proposals — shaping the technical approach and orchestrating inputs from discipline leads and partner teams (effort estimates, technical risks, resourcing) into integrated, defensible engineering responses.
• Ensure Design & Stress, Flight Sciences, and Product Innovation are effective cross-functional partners: flowing structural and aerodynamic requirements correctly, integrating loads and installation considerations across disciplines, and supporting manufacturing and liaison engineering on producibility and in-process issues.
• Develop appropriate systems of governance and control across the three functions to allow you to operate at a higher level; build scalable processes, standards, and delegation frameworks that grow with the organization.
• Insist upon outstanding levels of service from direct reports, freeing your time for proposals, strategy definition, process optimization, budgeting, people development, customer engagement, and SIOP planning.
• Contribute to strategy definition, resource planning, and Department-level initiatives that position AeroTEC as a preferred partner for structures, flight sciences, and product development work.
• Report critical program status, risk, and resource needs clearly and proactively to the Head of Engineering.
• Represent AeroTEC externally with customers, regulatory authorities, and industry partners — credibly and confidently — across the full technical breadth of the group.

The Skills You Will Bring (Minimum)

• Education
• Bachelor's Degree in Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a closely related engineering discipline.
• Advanced degree (M.S. or Ph.D.) in structures, aerodynamics, solid mechanics, or aerospace engineering is advantageous.
• Experience
• 15+ years of progressive aerospace engineering experience across structures, stress analysis, and/or flight sciences, with a minimum of 5 years in a leadership role managing engineering teams or functions — including experience managing other managers or group leads.
• Extensive direct experience in structural design and/or stress analysis on transport-category aircraft programs; FAR/CS Part 25 experience required. Flight sciences experience highly valued.
• Demonstrated experience leading structural and/or flight sciences certification efforts: working with DERs, managing compliance plans, and delivering substantiation packages to regulatory authorities (FAA, EASA, Transport Canada).
• STC and/or TC program experience strongly preferred; experience with both metallic and composite structure required.
• Experience with structural test planning and test support — static, fatigue, and/or damage tolerance testing — is highly valued; flight test exposure preferred.
• Experience with or exposure to product innovation, wind tunnel model programs, prototype development, or experimental aircraft is a plus.
• Familiarity with Part 23, rotorcraft, military, or autonomous air vehicle programs is a plus.
• Experience managing external engineering partnerships and subcontract resources preferred.