Job Description:

The Undersea Systems Division at Leidos currently has an opening for Director of Product Engineering in our Lynnwood, WA location.  This is an exciting new role to transform new product ideas into viable, producible products on an accelerated development timeline, while establishing the technical architecture, baseline, processes, and organizational knowledge required to sustain and evolve those products throughout their life cycle.

This position provides senior technical leadership from initial product concept through development, integration, production transition, and life-cycle support. The Director leads Integrated Product Teams and shapes product concepts, defines product requirements and architecture, establishes the developmental technical baseline, drives engineering execution and integration, and ensures products transition into production with the technical definition and organizational knowledge required for long-term success.

The Director serves as the technical product leader for assigned products and product families, connecting customer needs, product strategy, systems engineering, engineering competencies, manufacturing, test, logistics, and life-cycle support into a coherent technical effort. The position is expected to operate effectively in an environment where product concepts may begin with significant ambiguity; the Director will provide technical direction, structure, and urgency necessary to convert those concepts into successful products—at speed and scale.

The role combines product development leadership with life-cycle engineering ownership, ensuring that the organization not only delivers new products rapidly, but also builds the technical foundation necessary to maintain, improve, manufacture, support, and evolve those products over time.

This is an opportunity for a builder and technical problem solver to transform a highly capable but largely reactive organization into a more disciplined, integrated, and scalable product-focused operation—without losing the flexibility and ingenuity required to solve difficult customer and production problems.

The successful candidate will lead a team spanning systems engineering, design and development, integration, test, and validation, manufacturing and industrial engineering, production support, logistics, and technical support.

What You'll Do – Primary Responsibilities

• Transform product concepts into viable, producible products using an accelerated, iterative development approach that balances technical rigor, risk, and speed.
• Shape and define new products by translating customer needs and operational objectives into product visions, CONOPS, requirements, architectures, interfaces, and development strategies.
• Assemble and lead multidisciplinary technical teams across systems, mechanical, electrical, software, test, manufacturing, logistics, and other engineering competencies to achieve product objectives.
• Drive rapid development, prototyping, integration, and demonstration, using early hardware/software to validate assumptions, retire risk, and progressively mature the technical baseline.
• Provide technical leadership from concept through production, making engineering decisions, resolving technical issues, managing technical risk, and maintaining momentum toward product delivery.
• Establish repeatable product-development processes spanning requirements, architecture, design, prototyping, integration, verification, manufacturing planning, production, configuration management, and change management.
• Drive transition into production, ensuring products are technically mature, manufacturable, testable, documented, configured, and supportable.
• Own the technical health of products throughout their life cycle, driving improvements in reliability, manufacturability, supportability, obsolescence, and product capability.
• Capture and institutionalize technical knowledge and reusable engineering practices, building organizational capability that accelerates future product development and reduces dependence on individual expertise.

What We're Looking For – Primary Responsibilities

• A bachelor’s degree in engineering or a related technical field, with at least 15 years of significant experience in engineering leadership and product development.
• Significant experience leading multidisciplinary product development teams from concept through development, integration, production, and delivery of the product. 
• Demonstrated ability to rapidly transform ambiguous product concepts into executable technical solutions, using iterative development, prototyping, early integration, and progressive maturation of requirements and technical baselines.
• Strong technical problem-solving ability and engineering credibility, with the ability to work directly with experienced engineers, technicians, production personnel, program leaders, and customers to make sound technical decisions.
• Systems-level understanding of complex products, including the ability to integrate hardware, software, operational concepts, interfaces, test, manufacturing, and supportability into a coherent product architecture.
• Demonstrated success building and improving engineering organizations, particularly environments that are evolving from reactive, functionally siloed execution toward repeatable, integrated, and accountable product development.
• Experience transitioning complex engineering concepts to low and full rate production is preferred, with broad-based knowledge in integrating engineering, manufacturing, production, quality, test, supply chain, logistics, and program-management activities to successfully transition products from development into production.
• Experience establishing practical product-development, manufacturing planning, configuration/change management, production documentation, and production-readiness processes that provide rigor without unnecessarily slowing development.
• Exceptional communication, organizational, and leadership skills, with the ability to establish technical direction, build high-performing teams, resolve ambiguity, drive accountability, and maintain momentum toward aggressive product-development objectives.
• US Citizen, with ability to obtain and maintain a SECRET clearance.

The Person We're Looking For—Preferred Qualifications

You are comfortable taking an ambiguous product idea and turning it into something a technical team can understand, design, build, integrate, demonstrate, and ultimately produce. You can move between the customer, the product vision, the technical architecture, and the engineering details without losing sight of the outcome.

You know when engineering rigor is necessary—and when waiting for perfect requirements, complete information, or a fully mature process is simply slowing the team down. You are comfortable making informed technical decisions with incomplete information, taking measured risks, and using prototypes and early integration to learn quickly.  Ideally, you have relevant experience in a start-up environment.

You can work with a demanding customer, understand a difficult technical problem, bring multiple engineering disciplines together, and keep the team focused on delivering a product rather than completing isolated engineering tasks.

Most importantly, you know how to turn individual expertise and engineering heroics into repeatable product-development capability:

Shape the idea → define the product → build the team → prototype and integrate → learn and refine → establish the baseline → deliver the product → capture the knowledge → build the capability.

If that sounds like the kind of challenge you enjoy, we would like to hear from you.

SUBSEAMSS

The Leidos pay range for this job level is a general guideline only and not a guarantee of compensation or salary. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include (but are not limited to) responsibilities of the job, education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity, alignment with market data, applicable bargaining agreement (if any), or other law.