Chief Engineer, Global Data

Jeppesen ForeFlight; Englewood (CO); On-site; USD 208,000 - 255,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Open PTO Policy

401(k) with company matching

Maternity Leave

Paternity Leave

Flight Training

Job summary

Jeppesen ForeFlight seeks a Chief Engineer, Global Data to drive technical strategy and accelerate modernization of data platforms. You will operate as a high-leverage technical chief of staff, guiding cross-functional teams across engineering, product, data production, and security to deliver scalable, secure data solutions.

The role emphasizes AI-forward thinking, systems thinking, and advancement of data quality, observability, and operational excellence across aviation data systems.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of software engineering, data engineering, platform engineering, architecture, or technical leadership experience.

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.

Skills

Software architecture

Data engineering

Technical leadership

AI-forward mindset

Cross-functional collaboration

Cloud platforms

Job description

Jeppesen ForeFlight builds industry-leading aviation software and data products used by pilots, aircraft operators, flight departments, and major airlines worldwide. Our products depend on trusted, high-quality aviation data across flight planning, charts, navigation, airport operations, dispatch, mobile applications, and enterprise workflows.

As a high-growth, private equity-backed company, we are focused on scaling our technology, strengthening our data infrastructure, and defining the future of digital aviation.

About The Role

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.

Preferred Qualifications

• Aviation, aerospace, navigation, geospatial, mapping, logistics, transportation, defense, or safety-critical software experience.
• Experience with aeronautical data, airport mapping, charts, routing, flight planning, weather, or operational aviation systems.
• Experience with AI-enabled data validation, anomaly detection, semantic search, RAG, agentic workflows, model evaluation, or human-in-the-loop review systems.
• Experience leading technical modernization in a private-equity-backed, high-growth, or transformation-oriented environment.
• Experience with regulatory, compliance-sensitive, or mission-critical data products.
• Experience partnering directly with VP/SVP/C-level leaders as a technical advisor or chief-of-staff-style operator.
• Experience with cloud platforms, data lake/lakehouse architectures, event-driven systems, APIs, geospatial data systems, and modern data observability tools.

Why Join Us

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. We strive to provide our employees with a world-class benefits experience, focused on supporting their physical, financial, and emotional wellbeing.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision insurance with Employer paid health premiums
• Open PTO Policy
• 401(k) with up to 10% company matching and immediate vesting
• 12 Weeks Paid Maternity Leave
• 4 Weeks Paid Paternity Leave
• Flight Training Rewards

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

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