Project Engineering Lead

Overview

In this role you will lead cross-disciplinary engineering activities on a portfolio of projects within Leonardo UK’s Future Seekers, ensuring solutions meet customer, contractual, and regulatory requirements. You will drive engineering governance, resource planning, and bid preparation, while developing your team and collaborating with external partners. The position blends technical leadership with business awareness to deliver on time, cost, and performance goals. This role offers impact across research-driven programs in a global aerospace/defence context.

Pay / Benefits

• pension scheme with up to 15% employer contribution
• up to 12 additional flexi-days per year
• mental health support and financial advice
• bonus scheme
• 4,000+ online courses via Coursera and LinkedIn Learning
• private healthcare and other flexible benefits

Responsibilities

• Lead multi-disciplinary engineering teams to deliver across multiple projects within time, cost, and performance budgets
• Own engineering decision-making, trade-offs, and complex issue resolution
• Drive design maturity and conduct engineering design reviews
• Create engineering plans, milestones, and identify risks and inter-dependencies
• Review project engineering positions and adapt plans to mitigate cost/schedule/performance risks
• Prepare and communicate monthly engineering status reports
• Coordinate engineering input into bids as part of business winning
• Line-manage a team and contribute to career development

Key requirements

• Degree-level education in an engineering-related subject
• Experience leading multi-disciplinary engineering teams
• Experience managing or leading low TRL research programmes
• Strong understanding of engineering lifecycles and processes
• Experience in hardware electronics, firmware and mechanical product development (desirable)
• Experience collaborating with external partners (desirable)
• Experience in defence or aerospace industry (desirable)

• self-motivated and proactive
• strong leadership and communication
• ability to build effective working relationships
• engineering lifecycles and processes
• hardware electronics
• firmware

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