AI-First Engineering Program Leader

NCSL International; Eagan, Northern (MN, KY); Hybrid; USD 131,000 - 237,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health and Wellness programs

Income Protection

Paid Leave & Retirement

Job summary

Leidos is seeking an Engineering Program Manager to lead the Air Traffic Business Area and drive the L-CAP automation platform development. You will serve as a second-line engineering manager for an ART of about 110 personnel, directly supervising 4-6 People Managers who lead engineering teams.

Responsibilities include workforce planning, organizational design, staffing decisions, succession planning, and career development to retain critical skills, with a focus on AI-first practices and

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree with 8+ years of engineering management experience including 3+ years as a second-line manager (managing managers)
• Demonstrated experience building, scaling, and retaining engineering organizations of 75+ personnel in a matrixed environment
• Workforce planning expertise including headcount forecasting, skill gap analysis, and organizational design
• Engineering talent acquisition governance including requisition strategy, interview processes, and hiring decisions
• Performance management at scale including calibration, promotion governance, and compensation planning
• Experience managing engineering managers and developing management capability within technical organizations
• Resource allocation and capacity management across multiple concurrent engineering teams
• Budget management including labor cost forecasting, variance analysis, and headcount planning
• Effective stakeholder management across program leadership, HR business partners, and talent acquisition
• Ability to obtain and maintain a Public Trust clearance; US citizenship required; subject to government background investigation
• Experience managing workforce transitions in software-intensive modernization programs including skill migration and team restructuring
• Understanding of engineering competency frameworks and career ladder design for software and systems engineering disciplines
• Ability to obtain and maintain a Public Trust
• U.S. citizenship required
• Successful completion of background investigations as required by the government customer

Responsibilities

• Serve as second-line engineering manager for an ART of ~110 personnel, directly managing 4-6 People Managers who lead engineering teams
• Own workforce planning and organizational design for the ART including team structure, headcount allocation, and skill mix optimization
• Drive engineering staffing decisions including hiring priorities, requisition development, and candidate selection governance
• Manage engineering talent pipeline ensuring the ART maintains adequate bench strength, succession depth, and critical‑skill coverage
• Oversee career development strategy for engineering managers, ensuring People Managers are equipped to grow and retain their teams
• Govern performance management across the ART - calibrate ratings, align recognition, and ensure equitable evaluation standards
• Make cross-team resource allocation and rotation decisions to balance workload, develop talent, and address skill gaps
• Partner with the RTE and ART Product Manager on capacity planning, ensuring staffing aligns with delivery priorities
• Own engineering headcount budget and labor forecasting for the ART, coordinating with program finance on variance and projections
• Drive retention strategy including compensation alignment, engagement initiatives, and attrition risk mitigation
• Manage organizational change including team restructuring, role transitions, and onboarding/offboarding of engineering personnel
• Align engineering workforce composition with modernization priorities ensuring critical skill sets are developed and retained as legacy expertise transitions to cloud‑native competencies
• Develop workforce transition plans supporting engineering personnel reskilling from legacy ATC systems to modern distributed service architectures
• Coordinate engineering resource strategy across ART boundaries ensuring program-wide workforce balance and avoiding single-point-of-failure dependencies
• Champion an AI‑first engineering culture by identifying and applying AI‑assisted development capabilities, automation, and emerging software engineering practices that improve developer productivity, code quality, testing, and delivery.

Skills

Second-line manager

People management

Workforce planning

Organizational design

Talent strategy

Budget management

Stakeholder management

Agile leadership

Cloud modernization

AI-first culture

Education

Bachelor’s degree in engineering or related field

Job description

Leidos is seeking an Engineering Program Manager to lead the Air Traffic Business Area and drive the L-CAP automation platform development. You will serve as a second-line engineering manager for an ART of about 110 personnel, directly supervising 4-6 People Managers who lead engineering teams.

Responsibilities include workforce planning, organizational design, staffing decisions, succession planning, and career development to retain critical skills, with a focus on AI-first practices and