Chief Engineer
Role Overview
Founding executive role providing enterprise-level technical leadership for Sentinel, from clean-sheet design through certification, industrialization, and entry into service.
Reports to the Chief Executive Officer and works closely with the founding leadership team.
Owns Sentinel’s technical integrity, configuration, and engineering execution so the aircraft is coherent, certifiable, manufacturable, maintainable, and economically viable.
Key Skills for This Role
Full Job Posting
Role overview
Founding executive role providing enterprise-level technical leadership for Sentinel, from clean-sheet design through certification, industrialization, and entry into service.
Reports to the Chief Executive Officer and works closely with the founding leadership team.
Owns Sentinel’s technical integrity, configuration, and engineering execution so the aircraft is coherent, certifiable, manufacturable, maintainable, and economically viable.
Core mandate
- Serve as technical authority for aircraft architecture, requirements, configuration, and engineering decisions.
- Build and lead multidisciplinary engineering across aerodynamics, structures, propulsion and hybrid-energy systems, flight controls, avionics, systems, software, test, and integration.
- Establish design-review, requirements-management, configuration-control, and technical-risk processes.
- Integrate certification constraints with the Chief Airworthiness & Certification Officer; engineering and certification must mature concurrently.
- Set technology-sovereignty decisions with the CEO and drive prototype, conforming-aircraft, and flight-test readiness.
- Partner with Industrial & Supply Chain leadership on design for manufacture, make/buy strategy, critical suppliers, and production-system maturity.
- Develop technical talent and succession depth, while encouraging early escalation of adverse technical evidence.
First 12-month priorities
Baseline Sentinel system architecture, requirements, and top technical risks; establish configuration authority, engineering governance, and design-review cadence.
Create an integrated engineering, certification, and test maturity plan, plus technology-sovereignty and critical-dependency maps.
Define the Core15 / First50 engineering organization and priority hires.
Produce credible development-resource and capital requirements tied to evidence gates.
Candidate qualifications
- Proven senior engineering leadership on a clean-sheet or substantially new certificated aircraft, rotorcraft, powered-lift, or similarly complex aerospace system.
- Deep multidisciplinary aircraft systems-engineering judgment; hybrid-electric or propulsion experience is strongly valued.
- Experience moving hardware from concept through design, test, conformity or certification, and production readiness.
- Experience working directly with civil aviation authorities and certification organizations.
- Track record building high-performance engineering teams under schedule and capital constraints.
- Strong technical judgment, intellectual honesty, and ability to make hard tradeoffs without compromising safety.
Success and leadership
Success means a technically coherent Sentinel configuration with understood maturity, evidence, and resource needs, and no gap between engineering belief and what the company can prove.
Leadership expectations include transparency, evidence-led decisions, enterprise-first judgment, capital discipline, developing successors, and transferring capability.
Opportunity
Join the founding leadership team to shape the aircraft program, technical architecture, engineering organization, development discipline, and the institution that will build it.
Relocation support is available for candidates relocating to the UAE.
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