{"schemaVersion":"jobsearcher.job.v1","id":"49a5e36da8cbc1ab9ca21032","url":"https://jobsearcher.com/jobs/49a5e36da8cbc1ab9ca21032","canonicalUrl":"https://jobsearcher.com/jobs/49a5e36da8cbc1ab9ca21032","title":"Chief Engineer","description":"General Atomics Integrated Intelligence Inc. (GA-Intelligence) develops cutting-edge software solutions that transform raw data into actionable intelligence. We specialize in real-time global situational awareness and battle management, processing petabytes of data from hundreds of sources across air, land, and sea. Our systems—including the widely used THRESHER and DRAGONSPELL platforms—support tens of thousands of users at all levels of the DoD and Intelligence Community and enable critical decision-making for national security missions. We process hundreds of thousands of observations per minute, operating at the scale of global sensor networks and battlefield telemetry. Our backend architecture leverages technologies like Kafka, AWS, NiFi, and GeoMesa—the latter of which we designed and open-sourced—to deliver high-throughput, mission-resilient systems that turn streaming data into real-time intelligence.\nGA-Intelligence is seeking a Chief Engineer to help lead the technical direction of one of our commercial and international software programs. This individual will initially act as the Deputy Chief Engineer and will work in close partnership with the current Chief Engineer to learn the system, build trust across the organization, and progressively assume broader technical leadership responsibilities. Over time (approximately six months), this person will transition into the Chief Engineer role.\n\nThis is a senior technical leadership role for a large-scale operational software environment supporting commercial and international missions. The system is a complex, real-time platform focused on global situational awareness, tracking, data fusion, geospatial workflows, and operational decision support. It serves a large user base, integrates with numerous internal and external systems, and must operate with high reliability in demanding mission contexts.\n\nThe right candidate is a strong systems thinker, an experienced software and architecture leader, and a credible technical authority who will own the system. This person must be proactive, exercise sound engineering judgment, and have the confidence to make bold but disciplined technical decisions. Additionally, they should have experience and skill gaining concurrence for both technical and programmatic solutions with partners and customers. They should be comfortable setting direction, driving clarity, and taking accountability for outcomes without creating unnecessary risk in a mission-critical environment.\n\nDUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:\nPartner with the current Chief Engineer to understand the architecture, technical roadmap, dependencies, operational context, and major risks across the program.\nHelp define and maintain the overall technical direction of a complex software ecosystem involving real-time data ingest, tracking, fusion, geospatial capabilities, analytics, and external integrations.\nProvide technical leadership across multiple teams, subsystems, and engineering disciplines.\nGuide major architectural decisions and evaluate tradeoffs among performance, resiliency, maintainability, scalability, delivery speed, and long-term system health.\nTake ownership of end-to-end system integrity and help ensure the program is making sound technical decisions across teams.\nProactively identify technical risks, architectural friction points, and integration challenges before they become larger issues.\nHelp ensure strong engineering rigor in system design, integration planning, testing strategy, and technical execution.\nWork closely with program management, engineering managers, product leadership, and technical leads to align architecture and delivery.\nSupport technical planning, modernization efforts, risk reduction, release readiness, and cross-team coordination.\nManage disparate or competing needs among multiple business partners and customers, gaining acceptance for proposed solutions and timelines.\nMentor technical leaders and help strengthen the engineering bench across the organization.\nRepresent the program as a senior technical leader in customer and stakeholder engagements when needed, being comfortable and effective briefing both customers and partners.\nProgressively take on broader technical ownership in preparation for transition into the Chief Engineer role.\nWe recognize and appreciate the value and contributions of individuals with diverse backgrounds and experiences and welcome all qualified individuals to apply.\n\nJob Qualifications\nTypically requires a Bachelors, Masters or PhD in engineering or a related technical field as well as thirteen or more years of progressively complex engineering experience. May substitute equivalent experience in lieu of education.\nSignificant experience leading software engineering for large, complex, distributed systems.\nExperience serving in a senior technical leadership role such as Chief Engineer, Deputy Chief Engineer, Chief Architect, Principal Engineer, Technical Director, or similar.\nStrong systems engineering mindset and ability to understand complex end-to-end system behavior across many interacting components.\nExperience with mission-critical operational systems where reliability, performance, and up-time matter.\nDemonstrated ability to lead across organizational boundaries and influence multiple teams.\nProactive leadership style with a strong sense of ownership and accountability.\nSound engineering judgment and the confidence to make bold but disciplined decisions.\nExperience and skill in navigating disparate goals across multiple teams, partners, and customers.\nStrong communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical issues to senior leaders, customers, and mixed technical/non-technical audiences.\nThe ability obtain and maintain a DoD clearance.\n\nPREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:\nExperience with real-time data processing, tracking, sensor integration, data fusion, geospatial systems, or operational command-and-control style environments.\nExperience with cloud and distributed data systems, event-driven architectures, and large-scale integration environments.\nExperience working in, and debugging to solution for one-off, unusual customer architectures.\nExperience mentoring senior engineers and building technical leadership bench strength.\n\nWhat Success Looks Like:\nIn the first phase, the Chief Engineer will build a deep understanding of the mission, architecture, technical risks, and organizational landscape, while becoming a trusted partner to the current Chief Engineer and engineering leadership team. Over time, this individual will assume greater ownership of technical direction, improve architectural clarity and cross-team alignment, proactively address risk, and be prepared to transition into the Chief Engineer role.\n\nWhy Join GA-Intelligence?\nGA-Intelligence builds mission-critical software systems that support some of the most important national security missions in the country. Our teams work on technically hard problems with real operational impact, including global situational awareness, tracking, fusion, and decision support at scale.\n\nThis role offers the opportunity to help shape the future of a major operational system, partner with highly capable leaders and engineers, and grow into the senior technical leadership role for a large, complex, mission-driven program.\n\nJob Category\nEngineering\nExperience Level\nManagement\nWorkstyle\nHybrid\nFull-Time/Part-Time\nFull-Time Salary\nPay Range Low\n140,900\nPay Range High\n257,233\nTravel Percentage Required\n0% - 25%\nRelocation Assistance Provided?\nYes\nUS Citizenship Required?\nYes\nClearance Required?\nDesired\nClearance Level\nTop Secret (current SCI access with CI Poly)\nSearch Jobs at | General Atomics and Affiliated Companies","company":"General Atomics","rawCompany":"general atomics","city":"Poway","state":"CA","isRemote":false,"isActive":false,"createdAt":"2026-08-03T15:26:03.613Z","occupations":[{"code":"15-1299.08","title":"Computer Systems Engineers/Architects","slug":"computer-systems-engineers-architects"},{"code":"11-9041.00","title":"Architectural and Engineering Managers","slug":"architectural-and-engineering-managers"},{"code":"17-2199.00","title":"Engineers, All Other","slug":"engineers-all-other"}],"industries":[{"code":"541512","title":"Computer Systems Design Services","slug":"computer-systems-design-services"},{"code":"513210","title":"Software Publishers","slug":"software-publishers"},{"code":"541330","title":"Engineering Services","slug":"engineering-services"}],"jobPosting":{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"JobPosting","title":"Chief Engineer","description":"General Atomics Integrated Intelligence Inc. (GA-Intelligence) develops cutting-edge software solutions that transform raw data into actionable intelligence. We specialize in real-time global situational awareness and battle management, processing petabytes of data from hundreds of sources across air, land, and sea. Our systems—including the widely used THRESHER and DRAGONSPELL platforms—support tens of thousands of users at all levels of the DoD and Intelligence Community and enable critical decision-making for national security missions. We process hundreds of thousands of observations per minute, operating at the scale of global sensor networks and battlefield telemetry. Our backend architecture leverages technologies like Kafka, AWS, NiFi, and GeoMesa—the latter of which we designed and open-sourced—to deliver high-throughput, mission-resilient systems that turn streaming data into real-time intelligence.\nGA-Intelligence is seeking a Chief Engineer to help lead the technical direction of one of our commercial and international software programs. This individual will initially act as the Deputy Chief Engineer and will work in close partnership with the current Chief Engineer to learn the system, build trust across the organization, and progressively assume broader technical leadership responsibilities. Over time (approximately six months), this person will transition into the Chief Engineer role.\n\nThis is a senior technical leadership role for a large-scale operational software environment supporting commercial and international missions. The system is a complex, real-time platform focused on global situational awareness, tracking, data fusion, geospatial workflows, and operational decision support. It serves a large user base, integrates with numerous internal and external systems, and must operate with high reliability in demanding mission contexts.\n\nThe right candidate is a strong systems thinker, an experienced software and architecture leader, and a credible technical authority who will own the system. This person must be proactive, exercise sound engineering judgment, and have the confidence to make bold but disciplined technical decisions. Additionally, they should have experience and skill gaining concurrence for both technical and programmatic solutions with partners and customers. They should be comfortable setting direction, driving clarity, and taking accountability for outcomes without creating unnecessary risk in a mission-critical environment.\n\nDUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:\nPartner with the current Chief Engineer to understand the architecture, technical roadmap, dependencies, operational context, and major risks across the program.\nHelp define and maintain the overall technical direction of a complex software ecosystem involving real-time data ingest, tracking, fusion, geospatial capabilities, analytics, and external integrations.\nProvide technical leadership across multiple teams, subsystems, and engineering disciplines.\nGuide major architectural decisions and evaluate tradeoffs among performance, resiliency, maintainability, scalability, delivery speed, and long-term system health.\nTake ownership of end-to-end system integrity and help ensure the program is making sound technical decisions across teams.\nProactively identify technical risks, architectural friction points, and integration challenges before they become larger issues.\nHelp ensure strong engineering rigor in system design, integration planning, testing strategy, and technical execution.\nWork closely with program management, engineering managers, product leadership, and technical leads to align architecture and delivery.\nSupport technical planning, modernization efforts, risk reduction, release readiness, and cross-team coordination.\nManage disparate or competing needs among multiple business partners and customers, gaining acceptance for proposed solutions and timelines.\nMentor technical leaders and help strengthen the engineering bench across the organization.\nRepresent the program as a senior technical leader in customer and stakeholder engagements when needed, being comfortable and effective briefing both customers and partners.\nProgressively take on broader technical ownership in preparation for transition into the Chief Engineer role.\nWe recognize and appreciate the value and contributions of individuals with diverse backgrounds and experiences and welcome all qualified individuals to apply.\n\nJob Qualifications\nTypically requires a Bachelors, Masters or PhD in engineering or a related technical field as well as thirteen or more years of progressively complex engineering experience. May substitute equivalent experience in lieu of education.\nSignificant experience leading software engineering for large, complex, distributed systems.\nExperience serving in a senior technical leadership role such as Chief Engineer, Deputy Chief Engineer, Chief Architect, Principal Engineer, Technical Director, or similar.\nStrong systems engineering mindset and ability to understand complex end-to-end system behavior across many interacting components.\nExperience with mission-critical operational systems where reliability, performance, and up-time matter.\nDemonstrated ability to lead across organizational boundaries and influence multiple teams.\nProactive leadership style with a strong sense of ownership and accountability.\nSound engineering judgment and the confidence to make bold but disciplined decisions.\nExperience and skill in navigating disparate goals across multiple teams, partners, and customers.\nStrong communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical issues to senior leaders, customers, and mixed technical/non-technical audiences.\nThe ability obtain and maintain a DoD clearance.\n\nPREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:\nExperience with real-time data processing, tracking, sensor integration, data fusion, geospatial systems, or operational command-and-control style environments.\nExperience with cloud and distributed data systems, event-driven architectures, and large-scale integration environments.\nExperience working in, and debugging to solution for one-off, unusual customer architectures.\nExperience mentoring senior engineers and building technical leadership bench strength.\n\nWhat Success Looks Like:\nIn the first phase, the Chief Engineer will build a deep understanding of the mission, architecture, technical risks, and organizational landscape, while becoming a trusted partner to the current Chief Engineer and engineering leadership team. Over time, this individual will assume greater ownership of technical direction, improve architectural clarity and cross-team alignment, proactively address risk, and be prepared to transition into the Chief Engineer role.\n\nWhy Join GA-Intelligence?\nGA-Intelligence builds mission-critical software systems that support some of the most important national security missions in the country. Our teams work on technically hard problems with real operational impact, including global situational awareness, tracking, fusion, and decision support at scale.\n\nThis role offers the opportunity to help shape the future of a major operational system, partner with highly capable leaders and engineers, and grow into the senior technical leadership role for a large, complex, mission-driven program.\n\nJob Category\nEngineering\nExperience Level\nManagement\nWorkstyle\nHybrid\nFull-Time/Part-Time\nFull-Time Salary\nPay Range Low\n140,900\nPay Range High\n257,233\nTravel Percentage Required\n0% - 25%\nRelocation Assistance Provided?\nYes\nUS Citizenship Required?\nYes\nClearance Required?\nDesired\nClearance Level\nTop Secret (current SCI access with CI Poly)\nSearch Jobs at | General Atomics and Affiliated Companies","datePosted":"2026-08-03T15:26:03.613Z","dateModified":"2026-08-03T15:26:03.613Z","hiringOrganization":{"@type":"Organization","name":"General Atomics","sameAs":"https://jobsearcher.com"},"jobLocation":{"@type":"Place","address":{"@type":"PostalAddress","addressLocality":"Poway","addressRegion":"CA","addressCountry":"US"}},"identifier":{"@type":"PropertyValue","name":"JobSearcher","value":"49a5e36da8cbc1ab9ca21032"},"url":"https://jobsearcher.com/jobs/49a5e36da8cbc1ab9ca21032"}}