Chief Engineer

Are you ready for your next career challenge?

Role overview

Serve as the Chief Engineer and senior engineering authority for ESCS, maintaining continuity of technical direction and converting programme intent into a production-capable delivery path.

The role you will play

• Act as the senior engineering authority for ESCS and the principal technical interface to programme leadership.
• Set engineering direction, technical guardrails and decision routes across capability teams and suppliers.
• Ensure prototypes, demonstrations and IRAD outputs have a credible route to secure, scalable, supportable production delivery.
• Provide independent technical judgement when delivery, cost, schedule, risk and customer outcomes require trade-offs.

Primary responsibilities

• Own the ESCS engineering strategy, technical baseline, engineering management plan and technical decision record.
• Lead multidisciplinary engineering across architecture, software, integration, data, cloud infrastructure, security, test and service readiness.
• Translate customer outcomes and operational scenarios into technical priorities, increments and engineering acceptance criteria.
• Chair technical and design reviews and assure high-level and low-level designs, interfaces and non-functional requirements.
• Maintain technical authority over solution integrity, configuration, interfaces, technical debt and engineering risks.
• Identify the skills, supplier inputs, dependencies, assumptions and assurance evidence required for delivery.
• Align technical estimates, WBS/PBS content, resource assumptions and technical milestones with the integrated programme plan.
• Drive repeatable deployment, automated testing, configuration management, observability, security and documentation practices.
• Provide technical coaching and delegated authority while retaining accountability for the overall engineering solution.
• Support customer demonstrations, bids and investment decisions with clear evidence of feasibility, maturity and residual risk.

Required skills and capabilities

• Chief engineering or senior technical authority leadership.
• Systems engineering and lifecycle assurance.
• Enterprise and solution architecture.
• COTS and SaaS integration.
• API, event and data-flow architecture.
• Cloud-native engineering, Infrastructure as Code and DevSecOps.
• Non-functional requirements, security and operational readiness.
• Technical baseline, configuration and interface management.
• Technical planning, estimation, risk and design governance.
• Senior stakeholder, supplier and multidisciplinary engineering leadership.

Required experience

• Technical authority or engineering leadership for complex systems integration or enterprise platform delivery.
• Leading engineering across multiple disciplines rather than a single technology domain.
• Maintaining the integrity of an end-to-end solution through design, build, integration, verification and transition.
• Converting discovery, prototype or demonstration outputs into an assured production delivery path.
• Influencing senior stakeholders while remaining sufficiently close to delivery to resolve technical constraints.
• Producing and assuring technical documentation, estimates, design evidence and acceptance artefacts.

Desired experience

• Supply chain, procurement, order management or logistics technology.
• IBM Sterling OMS, Ivalua, planning platforms or comparable COTS products.
• AWS-based platforms, containerised workloads and automated deployment.
• IRAD, bid, demonstrator or product incubation environments.
• Defence, government or security-conscious delivery.

Success in the role

• The ESCS technical baseline is coherent, controlled and traceable to programme outcomes.
• Technical decisions are timely, explicit and supported by evidence.
• Capability teams and suppliers work within consistent engineering guardrails.
• The route from demonstration to production is understood, costed and assured.
• Technical debt, dependencies and assurance gaps are visible and actively managed.
• Programme leaders receive clear, credible and independent engineering advice.

Clearance Requirements

SC required to start SC required for the role.

What we do for you

At Leidos we are PASSIONATE about customer success, UNITED as a team and INSPIRED to make a difference. We offer meaningful and engaging careers, a collaborative culture, and support for your career goals, all while nurturing a healthy work-life balance. We provide an employment package that attracts, develops and retains only the best in talent.

Our reward scheme includes:

• Contributory Pension Scheme
• Private Medical Insurance
• 33 days Annual Leave (including public and privilege holidays)
• Access to Flexible benefits (including life assurance, health schemes, gym memberships, annual buy and sell holidays and a cycle to work scheme)
• Flexible Working Scheme

Commitment to Diversity

We welcome applications from every part of the community and are committed to a truly diverse and inclusive culture. We foster a sense of belonging, welcoming all perspectives and contributions, and providing equal access to opportunities and resources for everyone. If you have a disability or need any reasonable adjustments during the application and selection stages please let us know, and we will respond in a way that best fits your needs.

Who We Are

Leidos UK & EUROPE – we work to make the world safer, healthier, and more efficient through technology, engineering and science. Leidos is a growing company delivering innovative technology and solutions focused on safeguarding critical capabilities and transformation in frontline services, our work in the United Kingdom includes addressing some of the most complex problems in defence, healthcare, government, safety and security, and transportation.

What Makes Us Different

• Purpose: you can use your passion and abilities at Leidos to keep the people you care about safe. We are at the forefront of machine learning, AI, cyber security and solutions. Using your skills in the technology frontline by helping to build a safer world. You can inspire change.
• Collaboration: having flexibility to do your job is one of our core benefits, enabling you to become part of our extraordinary team. We have been empowering our people to work flexibly for years. Whether you work from home, the office or on customer sites, we will give you the digital tools and the flexibility to work smarter and align your needs and ours.
• People: Leidos empowers people from every background to be themselves and gives you the tools to learn new skills by enabling growth whilst developing. We believe that extraordinary people need opportunities to grow, to be inspired and to inspire others. At Leidos, we invest in technical academies, career rotations and a career development plans that enhance your future.

If you're looking for comfort, keep scrolling. At Leidos, we outthink, outbuild, and outpace the status quo — because the mission demands it. We're not hiring followers. We're recruiting the ones who disrupt, provoke, and refuse to fail.

Pay Range: 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.