Director of Engineering

Description Signia Aerospace is a global, integrated provider of high-performance systems and specialized components for the aerospace industry. Signia designs, manufactures, and services a wide range of products, that include mission equipment, thermal management systems, engine technology, and propellers. The Signia brands are leaders in their respective markets and provide a compelling value proposition to both aerospace and defense OEMs and end-users.

Onboard Systems Hoist & Winch, located in Anaheim, CA is one of the world’s leading providers of Search & Rescue (SAR) and Human External Cargo (HEC) advanced mission equipment for civil, commercial, and military helicopters.

Position Overview Location: Anaheim, CA (Onsite) Schedule: Monday - Friday Pay: $200,000 - $225,000 plus 20% bonus

The Director of Engineering oversees the engineering function in its entirety, including the mechanical, electrical, and product safety groups, as well as the manufacturing engineering group operating under sustaining engineering. The role also owns the company's India-based engineering function, approximately 60 people supporting software and electronic hardware development, primarily in support of the Pegasus program.

What You’ll Do

Pegasus Product Qualification and Certification

• The Director of Engineering must lead execution of the Pegasus qualification program from hardware readiness through completion of qualification testing. Pegasus has moved out of development and into qualification, with roughly 300 parts required over the following six weeks to support a qualification build start currently targeted for August and a testing completion goal later in the year. The Director of Engineering must manage the qualification schedule and plan, adjusting as part availability or other variables shift the start date while protecting the completion date, and must apply creativity and process efficiency before defaulting to additional short-term labor to hold the schedule. This includes managing compliance to EASA certification standards, the higher bar required by launch customer Leonardo and one that also satisfies FAA requirements and resolving design interpretation issues as they arise with the regulator. Potential obstacles include the typical disruptions of a qualification program, including component or test failures and design changes prompted by regulatory feedback, in addition to ongoing part availability constraints. Successful execution establishes Pegasus as a qualified, standalone hoist product ready for customer flight testing and full production, a foundation the company can build on for its next generation of hoist technology.

Cultural Transformation

• The Director of Engineering must complete a cultural transformation already underway within the team. Roughly 80% of the engineering group embodies the company's values and takes an outcome-oriented approach to their work, while a smaller group, largely engineers with legacy tenure predating the current ownership, remains task-oriented and treats completion of an assigned task as the end of their responsibility. The Director of Engineering must complete the department's culture training, take an active and direct role in providing feedback when an employee is not embodying the company's values, and engage the majority of the team who share those values in generating and acting on their own improvement ideas. A central obstacle is balancing this transformation against near-term technical risk, since some employees who have not yet embraced the shift also hold specialized knowledge the qualification program depends on, and the Director of Engineering may need to bridge that gap with contingency support rather than force an abrupt departure. When complete, the engineering team operates with a shared sense of ownership over outcomes rather than task completion, sustaining a mindset the business can carry beyond Pegasus.

Engineering Process Efficiency

• The Director of Engineering must recalibrate the engineering department's processes to match Onboard's current risk tolerance criteria rather than the more rigid standard inherited from prior ownership. Approval requirements for routine changes, such as releasing a drawing, currently involve more signoff than the actual risk of the change warrants, a holdover mindset built around not making mistakes rather than one calibrated to Onboard's own risk profile, and the process lacks contingency when an approver is unavailable. Some of the available fix is straightforward: an existing Teamcenter automation feature that integrates with SolidWorks was never enabled, and doing so would remove a substantial amount of manual setup from the drawing release process at comparatively low effort. The Director of Engineering must pursue that kind of accessible efficiency gain while also addressing the more fundamental question of which approvals are actually necessary and building resilience into the approval chain. The result is a process that reflects the level of rigor the business requires as development accelerates into new phases.

Legacy Product Manufacturability

• The Director of Engineering must reduce the manufacturability and supply chain risk carried by the company's legacy product line once Pegasus qualification clears. Legacy hoists are qualified individually at the OEM and platform level, and because approval of a second supplier is not automatically shared across OEMs even when the underlying part is common, the company has encountered situations where three of four OEMs approve an alternate source while a fourth does not, leaving the legacy line more exposed to single-source risk than necessary. Limited work has been done to address this to date given the demands of the Pegasus program, though the underlying opportunity, consolidating suppliers, improving designs for manufacturability, and securing broader second-source approval, has been identified. The Director of Engineering must treat this as a substantive body of work rather than incidental cleanup once the qualification effort concludes. Achieving this gives the legacy business a more resilient supply base and a more manufacturable product line to support continued volume.

New Product Development

• In addition to manufacturability of legacy product, there are several applications engineering projects that have been on hold due to a resource gap within engineering. The Director of Engineering will work with the BD team to establish priorities and execute on specific opportunities in a timely manner. The legacy product line involves a continued Sustaining Engineering level of effort that has a direct impact on the perceived effectiveness of Operations and Customer Support. The Director of Engineering will ensure that internal and external customers are well served, providing direct and transparent communication and accountability. Onboard has large potential programs tied to the development of new winches and evolution of existing hoist designs, The Director of Engineering will embrace the Value “Art of the Possible” in driving a more dynamic approach to product development.

Test Automation

• The Director of Engineering must bring automation to the company's test and validation processes. Onboard's test stands are custom built and unique to the business, and testing today is performed largely by manual methods, with capital already approved this year to begin automating them, though that work is more likely to begin in earnest next year given competing priorities. The Director of Engineering, working with the operations team that executes testing, must design and program automated test methods and acceptance testing procedures that reduce reliance on manual execution. This is a standing initiative rather than a task to defer indefinitely once Pegasus qualification is behind the team. The Director of Engineering will establish a test and validation function that supports both legacy production and Pegasus at a lower operational burden than today's manual approach.

Organizational Design

• The Director of Engineering must evaluate and, where warranted, redesign the engineering organization to support the business over the long term. Following a recent departure, the Electrical Engineering Manager position was consolidated into the Mechanical Engineering Manager role as a short-term accommodation, and the current manager layer is thinner than what the department is likely to need going forward. The Director of Engineering must assess whether the current structure, including the merged electrical and mechanical management, individual contributor staffing, and the India-based function, is sustainable, and design and implement changes accordingly. Overall, the Director of Engineering will create an engineering organization sized and structured to operate effectively once the Pegasus program moves into steady state.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• The Director of Engineering must build and sustain working relationships across the business's senior leadership team. This includes close coordination with Quality, Supply Chain, Operations, Finance, Business Development, Program Management, and Human Resources, along with providing technical support, including effort estimates, to the proposal and new business development process. Given the complexity of Onboard's electromechanical products relative to other businesses in the Signia portfolio, engineering is deeply embedded in the company's cross-functional operations rather than a standalone technical function. Strong relationships across these groups keep engineering positioned as a trusted partner to the rest of the business.

Customer and Regulatory Interface

• The Director of Engineering must maintain and expand direct engagement with customers and regulatory agencies, including the FAA and EASA. This involvement is expected to grow as the Pegasus program approaches qualification completion and as the company pursues additional customer programs. The Director of Engineering will work alongside the Vice President of Engineering and the company's technical fellow in these engagements, representing engineering directly to customers and regulators rather than through an intermediary. This keeps Onboard's technical credibility with customers and regulators intact as the business grows its program base.

Who You Are

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering required (Mechanical, Electrical, Systems, or Aerospace). Advanced degree is a plus but not required.

Experience

• 15 + years of engineering experience, with demonstrated leadership responsibility, reflecting the seasoning needed to navigate a qualification program and customer relationships with confidence.
• Currently in an engineering leadership role at an electromechanical systems or subsystems company.
• Direct experience interfacing with regulatory agencies, ideally both the FAA and EASA, gained through an OEM qualification process or a significant Supplemental Type Certificate development effort.
• Comfort operating through the ambiguity of an active qualification program, including design pivots driven by regulatory feedback and test outcomes.
• Design background on a product carrying intellectual property, at the full system level across mechanical, electrical, and product safety disciplines rather than at the individual component level.

Knowledge and skills

• Strategic and analytical thinker with the ability to interpret the impact of key business drivers on engineering priorities and schedule.
• Excellent interpersonal, written, and oral communication skills, with the emotional intelligence to lead a team through cultural and process change while maintaining strong cross-functional and customer relationships.
• Able to evaluate an existing organizational structure and design a sustainable long-term structure to support the function's growth.
• Familiarity with modern engineering tools and automation, including PLM systems such as Teamcenter and CAD platforms such as SolidWorks, sufficient to identify and drive process efficiency opportunities[PB4.1].

Additional Requirements

• This is an on-site, full-time position based in Anaheim, California.
• Travel is expected to be approximately 10%, primarily to visit key suppliers and customers.

What’s In It for You

• Benefits package including medical, dental, vision, life, disability
• Paid time off and holidays
• 401(k) plan with employer contribution matching
• In addition to offering competitive wages and benefits, Onboard Systems also offers the opportunity to increase your future earnings tied to growth in company performance. We recognize employee contributions toward growing the business through our unique Growth Participation Unit program (GPU). GPUs are tied directly to company growth and reward all eligible employees with cash when the business grows over time.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, national origin, disability, veteran status, age, marital status, pregnancy, genetic information, or other legally protected status