[Hiring] Lead Engineer, Air @UFORCE

Role Description

UFORCE is looking for a Lead Engineer, Air to take hands-on technical ownership of our first Western-facing air product, turning operational lessons from Ukraine into a reliable, manufacturable system that customers can test, deploy and reorder.

• Your initial focus will be one product.
• Bring engineering, manufacturing, supply chain and field teams together around a controlled design and a clear delivery plan.
• Resolve reliability and integration challenges that stand between today’s product and repeatable production.
• This is a hands-on technical leadership role, not a management-only position.
• Stay close to the hardware, own system-level engineering decisions and ensure that changes are proven through testing and reflected in what we build.
• As our air portfolio expands, there is potential to grow into broader technical leadership, including Chief Engineer, Air.
• Progression will depend on business need and demonstrated performance, rather than a fixed promotion timetable.

Qualifications

• Hands-on UAS engineering ownership: Experience leading delivery of a complete air vehicle or substantial integrated UAS product, with clear evidence of your own technical decisions and their impact on flight performance.
• Systems integration judgement: The ability to reason across mechanical, electrical, flight-control, communications, navigation and software interfaces, and recognise when specialist depth is needed.
• Prototype-to-production experience: Meaningful involvement in taking an aerial product into repeatable production, including design for manufacture, configuration control and production testing.
• Reliability and test discipline: A track record of diagnosing flight or field failures, identifying root causes and proving corrective actions through repeatable testing.
• Cross-functional technical leadership: The ability to set priorities, coordinate engineers and specialist partners, and drive delivery through influence as well as formal authority.
• Cost and component judgement: Practical understanding of how design decisions affect availability, qualification, unit cost, manufacturing quality and applicable sourcing requirements.
• Operational awareness: Understanding of how GNSS denial, jamming, communications resilience and operator feedback influence UAS design and testing.
• Startup execution: Comfort working close to hardware, making decisions with incomplete information and balancing delivery speed with appropriate engineering control.
• Clear communication and ownership: The ability to distinguish demonstrated capability from development goals, explain limitations and escalate technical, safety or resource risks early.
• Willingness to travel regularly to engineering teams, manufacturing sites, test ranges and customers.

Requirements

• Direct experience working with Ukrainian UAS teams, products or operators.
• Experience adapting products for Western defence customers.
• Familiarity with applicable NDAA, Blue UAS and export-control requirements.
• Experience supporting customer trials, military qualification or airworthiness activity.
• Experience with payload integration or payload-release systems.
• Experience coordinating engineering and manufacturing across countries.
• Evidence of growing from hands-on product ownership into broader technical leadership.

Company Description

UFORCE exists to make aggression unaffordable. Founded in Ukraine and headquartered in London, UFORCE is a defence-technology company with operations across Europe, the United States and Asia. UFORCE builds uncrewed vessels, ground robotics and aircraft, autonomy software, and the command-and-control layer that operates them together.

• Each platform is deployable on its own, and stronger as part of the system.
• Product lines include the MAGURA family of uncrewed surface vessels, the NEMESIS family of strike platforms, the LIUT family of ground robotic platforms, and counter-UAS systems.