Chief of Staff

Chief of Staff

Company: Aeronautical engineering services · UAS and urban air mobility · Client name disclosed after initial screen
Location: Portland, Oregon (onsite, remote not accepted). Relocation is strongly preferred. For the right person we can make an arrangement work where you are on site roughly two weeks out of every month. Fully remote is not a fit for this role.
Compensation: $140,000 to $160,000 base, depending on experience, plus a 25% target bonus

About the Client

We are an engineering services firm in Portland, Oregon. We do conceptual design and detailed aerodynamic and aero-structural engineering for other companies' products: large UAVs, urban air mobility platforms, and defense programs. Roughly a third of our work is with eVTOL and air taxi developers, a third is defense UAV programs, and a third is smaller civil work, everything from delivery drones to regional logistics aircraft.

We have no products of our own. Clients come to us because they need aircraft designed and, often, physically built. About half our work is design and half is prototype fabrication and assembly, which means we have put first flight and early serial production aircraft into the air for programs you would recognize.

We are about 30 full-time engineers plus 15 to 20 subcontractors, running four or five development programs in a given year. We have been doing this for ten years. We are profitable, we are growing, and we have not turned work away.

About the Role

Our engineering capacity has grown faster than the layer that manages it. We can staff more programs than we can currently plan, sequence, and steer. The Chief of Staff is the hire that closes that gap.

You would report directly to one of the partners, a former military aviator who runs the programs side of the business. The role is a genuine hybrid: program management, client and account management, some business development, and internal operations. In a firm this size that is not a compromise, it is the job. You are the person who takes a program from a well-planned proposal through the six months of reality that follow it, and keeps the plan, the engineering team, and the client all pointed the same direction.

Responsibilities

• Run development programs end to end. You partner with a Chief Engineer on each program and own the plan, the schedule, the budget, and the client relationship around it.
• Steer programs when the plan changes, because it will. Proposals are built on a clean set of assumptions. Two weeks in, the context shifts. Your job is to make the trade deliberately rather than letting it happen by drift.
• Manage clients and their expectations. When a program needs more attention or schedule relief, you make the case and frame it in terms of what actually serves the client's aircraft.
• Put informed pressure on the engineering side. Not to move faster for its own sake, but to make sure work is scoped and sequenced well.
• Pull the numbers and make the call. Get into our program database, pull actuals on aerodynamics hours or mechanical engineering hours from a prior program, compare them against where a current program sits, and come back with a recommendation. The deliverable is the recommendation, not the pivot table.
• Support capture and proposal work as you build context, and take more of it over time.
• Improve the operating system underneath all of the above. The cadence, the templates, and the SOPs that let the next program manager ramp faster than you did.

How the First Year Works

The ramp is deliberate. For roughly the first six months you shadow the partner across several key programs. You learn where we put attention, where the real decision points are, and where an experienced team is comfortable improvising. You are doing real work throughout, not observing.

After that you start getting peeled off onto your own programs. The target end state is that you run them essentially autonomously, reporting out to the partner in a couple of hours a week. That is the bar this role is measured against.

Requirements

• Roughly four to eight years of professional experience. This is not a senior hire and it is not an entry-level one.
• A quantitative background. An engineering undergraduate degree is a plus. So is any graduate work where you were expected to do real analysis and make defensible trades between options with cost consequences.
• Enough technical grounding that an undergraduate physics level conversation is comfortable. If an engineer tells you a change is not feasible because of the torsion on the wing, you should not be looking up the word torsion.
• Ownership. You move fast, you work independently, and you know the difference between a question worth asking and one you should go answer yourself.
• The ability to talk to a business leader like a peer. Our partners advise clients on product development and business strategy, so you will be in front of senior people early.
• Strong written and verbal communication. Much of this job is making a case to someone who was not in the room.

You will not be doing design work. We are not looking for a practicing engineer, and we are not looking for a career project manager with a PMP and no appetite for ambiguity. We are looking for someone hungry and effective who wants a large scope early.

Backgrounds That Fit

• A junior military officer coming out of an MBA program who wants an operating role rather than a traditional post-MBA path.
• A junior military officer with a business or engineering undergraduate degree going straight into industry.
• Someone one to two years into a large company, in strategy, operations, or program management, who has concluded that the scope there is too narrow and the pace too slow.

Prior military service is not a requirement. It is a common pattern for this seat and the partner shares that background.

Where This Goes

Be clear-eyed about what this is. It is not a partner track and it is not a thirty year seat. It is a role where you build a name quickly, in a firm that touches the most interesting aircraft programs in the country, working alongside people who advise those companies at a senior level.

Three to five years here should leave you with a real set of options, internally as the firm grows, or at an aircraft or other tech product company. That outcome is a feature of the role, not a risk we are hiding from.