US Head of Engineering

Strategic Priorities

• Unified Product Advocacy: Represent the Americas' technical interests within the Global Product Engineering Leadership Team. Ensure the global roadmap is "Americas-ready" by influencing core development to include regional requirements by design.
• Requirement Distillation: Act as the primary engineering filter for AdNav Americas opportunities. Analyze complex, often sensitive client needs and translate them into robust, general-purpose capabilities that enhance the value proposition.
• Strategic Modularity: For requirements governed by SSA or specific security air gaps, lead the design of a modular "secure layer." This approach ensures we meet the most stringent classified obligations while preserving the integrity and update-velocity of the core global platform.
• Operational Efficiency: Optimize the engineering footprint by championing "Common Core" development. Drive a culture that prioritizes sustainable, platform-wide solutions over bespoke, localized engineering efforts, thereby maximizing the return on R&D investment.
• PNT Subject Matter Leadership: Provide executive-level technical guidance on the evolving Americas PNT landscape, ensuring our hardware and software evolution anticipates shifts in resilient navigation, sensor fusion, and regulatory standards.

Roles & Responsibilities

• Team Build-Out: Establish Advanced Navigation Americas’ engineering presence from the first hire. Define team structure, hiring requirements, and a multidisciplinary culture that balances Systems, Hardware, and Electronics with a core Software Engineering focus.
• Portfolio Ownership: Hold end-to-end responsibility for the Americas engineering portfolio, including roadmap development, delivery execution, and budget management across all R&D disciplines.
• AI-Augmented Engineering: Champion AI-native development practices across the engineering team to ensure the adoption of LLM-assisted coding and automated engineering workflows drive tangible productivity.
• Product Lifecycle Ownership: Own the full Development Lifecycle for US-focused product add-ons from design through delivery, release management, and post-launch improvement, ensuring seamless integration between hardware and software components.
• Strategic Alignment: Set AdNav Americas R&D team metrics and keep the team's work tightly coupled to Advanced Navigation's global mission and the global Product team where SSA & ITAR / EAR will allow. Translate long-term company goals into a concrete, executable multidisciplinary engineering roadmap.
• Cross-Functional Orchestration: Connect Engineering, Product Management, Business Development, and Customer Support. Software should be built with commercial intent, sold with technical credibility, and supported with rigour.
• Ecosystem Collaboration: Work closely with Advanced Navigation's Sydney-based product teams across Navigation Solutions, Software Platforms, Robotics, Inertial, and Acoustics.
• Talent Strategy: Build and sustain a high-talent-density team. Own recruiting, onboarding, mentoring, and professional development for the US engineering team, so the division can attract and keep people capable of world-class work.

Qualifications, Experience & Skills

• Degree in Software, Electrical, or Systems Engineering, Computer Science, Geodesy, Mechatronics, or a related technical discipline. An MSc or advanced degree is highly regarded.
• 10+ years of Engineering Leadership: A proven track record leading multidisciplinary engineering teams (Systems, Hardware, and Software) to deliver complex, field-deployed systems in demanding real-world environments.
• 5+ years in Product-Centric Organizations: Deep, hands-on experience with product discovery, design thinking, iterative delivery, and product ownership across the full lifecycle for the defense industry.
• AI & Automation Proficiency: Demonstrated, practical use of AI-augmented development tooling: LLM-based coding assistants, AI-driven prototyping platforms, and agentic development workflows.
• Domain Depth: Experience in navigation, satellite positioning (GNSS, PPP, PNT), robotics, autonomous systems, or related precision-technology domains is strongly preferred. Familiarity with the US defense, maritime, or energy-sector regulatory markets is advantageous.
• Founder / Greenfield Experience: Demonstrated ability to build teams, practices, and products from the ground up, in a new geography or business unit, with limited initial resources.
• Team Leadership: Proven experience leading cross-functional and cross-cultural product teams. Comfort operating across time zones and within a globally coordinated organization is essential.
• Inspired Leadership: The ability to motivate technically elite team members through vision, clarity of context, and a human-centered leadership philosophy.
• Strategic Planning: Expert ability to map long-term corporate objectives to concrete technical roadmaps, balancing engineering excellence with commercial requirements.
• Conflict Resolution: Skilled at navigating cross-functional friction between engineering rigour and commercial urgency, US and global priorities and precision-technology standards.
• Advanced Communication: Able to articulate complex engineering architectures and multidisciplinary trade-offs clearly to both technical specialists and non-technical executive stakeholders.