Chief Engineer, Global Data Management

We are looking for a Chief Engineer, Global Data to serve as a senior technical leader for our Global Data organization. This role will partner directly with Global Data leadership to shape technical strategy, improve execution, raise engineering quality, and accelerate the modernization of our data platforms, pipelines, products, and operating model.

This is not a traditional people-management-only role. It is a high-leverage technical leadership role for someone who can operate like a technical chief of staff: connecting strategy to execution, driving cross-functional alignment, identifying technical risks, improving decision quality, and helping teams move faster with clarity.

The ideal candidate is AI-forward, deeply technical, operationally sharp, and comfortable working across ambiguity. They understand data-intensive systems, software engineering, architecture, automation, and product delivery. Aviation data experience is strongly preferred, but not required for an exceptional technical leader with strong systems thinking and a builder mindset.

Key Responsibilities:

• Serve as the senior technical partner to Global Data leadership, helping translate business strategy into technical priorities, execution plans, and measurable outcomes
• Define and drive technical strategy across global data platforms, data production systems, data quality, data governance, data delivery, and data-enabled products
• Act as a technical chief of staff for high-priority initiatives: clarify goals, structure work, identify dependencies, unblock teams, and ensure execution quality
• Partner with Engineering, Product, Data Production, Architecture, Security, Operations, Customer Success, and business leaders to align roadmap, architecture, and delivery
• Lead technical reviews for major initiatives, ensuring solutions are scalable, resilient, secure, maintainable, and aligned with long-term platform direction
• Identify opportunities to apply AI, automation, machine learning, intelligent QA, data validation, workflow orchestration, and developer productivity tools across the Global Data organization
• Help modernize legacy systems, processes, and data pipelines while maintaining the reliability and trust required for aviation data
• Establish technical standards, architecture patterns, engineering practices, and decision frameworks that improve quality and speed
• Drive improvements in data quality, lineage, observability, reliability, validation, and operational excellence
• Create clear technical narratives, executive briefings, decision documents, tradeoff analyses, and implementation plans
• Partner with product and business leaders to evaluate build/buy/partner decisions, investment cases, and platform modernization opportunities
• Mentor senior engineers, architects, technical leads, and emerging leaders across the organization
• Build a culture of high agency, technical rigor, pragmatic innovation, and continuous improvement

Basic Qualifications:

• 15+ years of software engineering, data engineering, platform engineering, architecture, or technical leadership experience
• Experience operating as a senior technical leader across complex, distributed, data-intensive systems
• Strong architecture judgment across data platforms, APIs, pipelines, cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, integration patterns, and operational tooling
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional technical initiatives without relying solely on formal authority
• AI-forward mindset with practical experience or strong fluency in applying AI to engineering, data quality, automation, analytics, knowledge workflows, developer productivity, or intelligent products
• Strong ability to simplify complex technical issues into clear decisions, priorities, and executive-level narratives
• Experience improving engineering execution: planning, technical discovery, delivery quality, observability, incident learning, and operational excellence
• Strong understanding of data governance, data quality, data lineage, metadata, validation, and lifecycle management
• Ability to work across legacy systems and modern cloud-native architectures
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills; able to engage deeply with engineers and clearly with executives
• Builder mindset: willing to prototype, inspect systems directly, ask sharp questions, and turn ambiguity into forward motion
• High judgment, low ego, and strong bias for practical outcomes

About Jeppesen ForeFlight:

Jeppesen ForeFlight is a leading provider of innovative aviation software solutions, serving the Commercial, Business, Military, and General Aviation sectors globally. Combining Jeppesen’s 90-year legacy of accurate aeronautical data with ForeFlight’s expertise in cutting-edge aviation technology, the company delivers an integrated suite of tools designed to enhance safety, improve operational efficiency, and sharpen decision-making.

Why You Should Join:

At Jeppesen ForeFlight, we know you want a rewarding career. To do that, you need challenging projects, a good work environment, and awesome coworkers. We believe in our employees, and we empower them to make a direct impact on our products and services messaging. We strive to provide our team and their loved ones with a world-class benefits experience, focused on supporting their physical, financial, and emotional wellbeing. Our benefits package includes but not limited to the following:

• Medical, dental, vision insurance with employer-paid health premiums
• Open PTO policy
• 401(k) with company matching and immediate vesting
• 12 weeks paid parent leave
• 2 days off to volunteer annually
• Employee Assistance Program
• Flight Training Stipend

Pay is based upon candidate experience and qualifications, as well market and business considerations: Summary Pay Range: $208,000-$255,000 USD.

Jeppesen ForeFlight - EOE including Disability/Vets | Pay Transparency | E-Verify Participant | Equal Opportunity Employer