Deputy Chief Engineer, Discovery

We are building an expeditionary force: a small group of engineers who want to do big, new, hard things and who move into unfamiliar territory as a matter of course. As Deputy Chief Engineer in Discovery, you lead the technical work on concepts nobody has proven, usually several at once. You learn whatever domain each one lives in and build the thing that tests it: the prototype, the test article, the demonstration. Analysis gets a concept to the point where it is worth building; building it is how we find out.

You are the technical authority for the concepts you own: you set the approach, review the work, and decide, on the evidence, which concepts continue and which stop. The problems change; the approach does not: reason from first principles, build it, test it, and reach a solution.

You are not hired for a particular skill set. You are hired for a record of building things: taking a concept from an idea to hardware or software that works, across different areas, and getting to solutions. You are also the adversary to our own ideas. The rigor that validates a good concept is the same rigor that kills a bad one early, while it is still cheap, and you apply it to your own work first.