Vice President of Engineering, Missile R&D

About SerenX

SerenX is building the next generation of portable, autonomous defensive missile systems to protect America and our allies. Our mission is to deliver advanced, affordable air defense capabilities at a fraction of the cost and complexity of traditional systems.

We're an institutionally funded defense technology company performing work on U.S. Department of Defense contracts, with a founding team that includes Y Combinator alumni, former Special Operations leaders, and experienced aerospace engineers.

We design, build, fly, test, break, and improve our own hardware. We're looking for the engineering leader who will build the organization around those people.

The Role

We're hiring a Vice President of Engineering, R&D to build SerenX's engineering headquarters in Melbourne, Florida.

Melbourne is not a satellite office. It is where the technology begins, where the systems are engineered and tested, and where we support American and allied operators around the world. The pace we are building for is chalkboard to first operational employment in months, not years, when the hardware, the law, and the end user allow it.

You may have spent years on flight hardware at a place like SpaceX, Blue Origin, L3Harris, or Northrop Grumman. You learned how ambitious hardware gets built, and you learned how a large organization can make that work harder than it needs to be. You want to build something of your own.

The Founder and CTO sets the technology. You lead the people, the execution, and the engineering organization that turn that direction into working, fielded systems. In 2027, working with him, you will grow this team to about 30 people and carry three missile programs at once. You are not inheriting that organization. You get to build it.

Location: Melbourne, FL (On-site)

Employment: Full-time Compensation: $210,000–$255,000 annually + equity

Reports to: Founder & CTO

What You'll Do

• Grow a multidisciplinary engineering headquarters across mechanical, electrical, aerospace, flight software, autonomy, integration, prototyping, and flight test.
• Hire for ability, integrity, curiosity, and how someone treats the people beside them.
• Give every engineer clear ownership, and a path to get better that does not require them to become a manager.
• Teach. Know what each person is trying to become, and invest in it.
• Make disagreement normal, including from the junior engineer and the technician. Credit goes to the people who did the work.
• Carry three missile programs at once, and build leads who can run a piece of that work without you in the room.
• Keep the interfaces, the tests, and the field feedback connected.
• Keep the pace high without burying the shop in meetings. Enough record to know what flew, what changed, and why.
• Bring what the range, the operators, and the defense-services teams learn back into the next design.
• Protect the team's time and its standards. Extraordinary effort when the work needs it. Not exhaustion as the normal week.
• Stay close enough to the hardware and the range to be useful, and support the people who want to train, travel, and see the work with operators, including overseas.

What We're Looking For

• 12+ years in aerospace, defense, missiles, autonomous aircraft, or other flight hardware, with real time on integration and test, not only reviews.
• 5+ years leading engineers across more than one discipline, including hiring, coaching, and developing people into larger roles.
• Evidence you have led, or are ready to lead, on the order of 15 to 50 people, and that you can name the leads who made that possible.
• You have taken complex hardware from design through integration, test, and use, and you can talk about what broke and what the team learned.
• Enough depth in one discipline to be useful beside a senior mechanical or flight-software lead, and the habit of leaving the pencil in their hand.
• A record of recruiting and growing engineers who would work for you again.
• You can move fast and still stop a test, a design, or a date when the evidence says to.
• Willingness to work on-site in Melbourne, Florida and be on the range with the team.
• A bachelor's degree in engineering, physics, or a related field, or equivalent depth of engineering and leadership experience.

Particularly Valuable Experience

• A director or senior director ready to leave SpaceX, Blue Origin, L3Harris, Northrop Grumman, Collins, Lockheed Martin, Rocket Lab, Anduril, or a smaller shop that actually flies hardware, and build the organization you wish you had worked in.
• You have already been the person between a founder, or a chief engineer, and a team.
• You have grown a team from a small founding group toward a larger multidisciplinary shop, and developed the leads as you went.
• Missiles, interceptors, UAVs, spacecraft, propulsion, or flight test.
• Configuration, test readiness, and production discipline put in place without freezing a young program.
• Experience with DoD customers, export-controlled technology, or military operational requirements.
• An active U.S. Government security clearance. Secret, Top Secret (TS), or TS/SCI is useful. We can sponsor the right person.

Who Thrives Here

You have reached the point where building great engineers matters as much to you as building great machines. You remember what it was like to be young, with an ambitious idea, and to have someone senior who believed in you. You want to be that person for someone else.

You can stand at the bench, listen, and clear the obstacle. You are not trying to prove you are the smartest person in the room. You know the quiet technician who sees a failure nobody else sees can matter as much as the person who drew the system.

You know when to push, when to turn, and when to stop. You can make a hard call without becoming hard on people. You measure your leadership by what your people become able to do, not by how much they still need you.

We move quickly. We take calculated technical risk. We will break expensive hardware when that is how we learn something that matters. We are not building a traditional aerospace bureaucracy, and we are not replacing one with a shop that runs on emergencies and burnout.

How to Stand Out

We care more about the people you have developed, and the hardware you helped deliver, than the number of people who reported to you.

Send three stories. An engineer or a team you taught, and what they can do now that they could not do before. A program you carried through a failed test, a bad date, or a hard stretch, and how the team came through it. A leadership decision you made to protect the team's work or its culture.

Tell us what you would build differently if you got to shape an engineering organization from its early days. We are hiring the person whose old team would follow them to Melbourne.

Export Control & Equal Opportunity

This position involves access to ITAR-controlled defense articles and technical data. Candidates must qualify as a U.S. person under 22 CFR 120.62.

SerenX is an equal opportunity employer. Employment decisions are based on qualifications, merit, and business needs, without unlawful discrimination based on any legally protected characteristic.

Learn more: https://serenx.com/careers/vice-president-engineering-rd