Director of Engineering and Site Lead - Poland
Position Overview:
We are seeking an experienced Aerospace Engineering Leader to lead the Krakow-based Poland engineering site through its next phase of maturity, focus, and global impact within Honeywell Aerospace (HA) and Aerospace Europe Engineering (AEE). The Poland site is one of AEE’s major engineering locations, with approximately 100 employees, established foundations, and significant opportunity to strengthen its role in the broader HA engineering system.
The leader will build on what is already in place, further strengthen leadership, execution discipline, and stakeholder connections, and position the site to contribute more effectively across HA and AEE.
This role requires a senior leader who can build on what is already in place, further raise execution excellence and engineering rigor, and prepare the site to operate more naturally in capability-led, cross-site ways of working over time.
The ideal candidate will bring senior engineering or R&D leadership experience in a global, matrixed, safety-critical environment, preferably Aerospace, with the maturity, enterprise perspective, and cultural agility to lead a major European site while connecting strongly with US and global stakeholders.
ResponsibilitiesKey Responsibilities:
1. Site Strategy, Capability Focus, and AEE Contribution:
- Own the Poland site’s contribution to HA/AEE engineering priorities, ensuring local capabilities, talent, and delivery commitments are aligned with broader business and technology needs.
- Translate HA and AEE strategic priorities into clear Poland objectives and execution plans, ensuring local activities, investments, and talent development deliver measurable business value.
- Define and communicate a clear role for the Poland site as one of AEE’s major engineering locations, aligned to HA priorities and the broader European engineering system.
- Focus Poland on a few differentiated capability areas that build on existing strengths and regional megatrends, complement the HA/AEE portfolio, and position the site for broader cross-site contribution.
2. Execution Excellence and Operating Maturity:
- Provide overall site leadership for engineering delivery, operational performance, resource priorities, and execution commitments across Poland-based teams.
- Lead the site’s annual operating planning for workforce, cost, investment, and capacity, and ensure disciplined execution against the AOP and related performance commitments.
- Maintain and further strengthen disciplined operating mechanisms, metrics, and leadership routines that improve delivery predictability, engineering quality, accountability, and pace across the site.
- Own and further mature interfaces, governance, escalation paths, and decision rights across engineering, support, and enabling functions established through the company separation.
- Sustain a culture of continuous improvement, standard work, and disciplined problem solving while maintaining HA standards for safety, quality, compliance, and product integrity.
3. Leadership, Culture, and Succession:
- Lead the Poland engineering leadership team as a visible, accountable, and globally connected leadership body within HA/AEE.
- Build and strengthen the local leadership bench by coaching managers, developing successors, and preparing selected leaders for broader capability-led and cross-site responsibilities over time.
- Strengthen the leadership team’s end-to-end mission ownership and ability to navigate strategy execution and execution escalations through the broader HA organization.
- Sustain a high-performance, inclusive, and globally connected culture that operates with urgency, collaboration, engineering rigor, and pride in Poland’s role in HA/AEE.
4. Global Stakeholder, Talent, and Ecosystem Engagement:
- Represent the Poland site to HA engineering leadership, AEE, business, program, product, functional, and external stakeholders, ensuring the site is visible, credible, trusted, and well connected in global forums.
- Connect Poland teams with global engineering networks and AEE peer sites so that practices, expectations, talent, and leadership standards flow effectively across locations.
- Maintain and further strengthen university, research, and innovation ecosystem relationships to support targeted talent pipelines, applied collaboration, and external visibility in areas aligned to Poland’s capability focus.
Qualifications
Qualifications and Experience:
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Engineering or a related technical field; advanced business or leadership education is a plus.
- Significant senior engineering, R&D, or technical site leadership experience, preferably within Honeywell Aerospace or another safety-critical, regulated industry.
- Demonstrated success leading engineering organizations in a global matrix, connecting site teams to enterprise priorities, senior stakeholders, peer locations, and global best practices.
- Deep, working-level understanding of U.S.-based Aerospace Engineering organizations, operating models, stakeholder expectations, and engineering practices, with the ability to build trusted relationships across U.S. and global engineering leadership.
- Proven ability to improve delivery predictability, engineering quality, accountability, and operational performance in complex engineering organizations.
- Strong people leadership skills, including leadership development, succession planning, and coaching in a global engineering environment.
- Ability to define strategic focus, communicate a compelling vision, and align multidisciplinary teams around a small number of high-impact priorities.
- Excellent communication and stakeholder-management skills, with credibility across senior leaders, technical teams, universities, partners, and cross-functional stakeholders.
- Fluency in English is required; Polish language capability and experience working across cultures are advantages.
- Willingness to travel as needed to maintain strong connections with global HA leadership, AEE peer sites, business stakeholders, and partner organizations.
Skills Required
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Engineering or a related technical field
- Significant senior engineering, R&D, or technical site leadership experience
- Experience leading engineering organizations in a global matrix
- Working-level understanding of U.S.-based aerospace engineering organizations, operating models, stakeholder expectations, and engineering practices
- Experience improving delivery predictability, engineering quality, accountability, and operational performance
- Strong people leadership skills, including leadership development, succession planning, and coaching
- Ability to define strategic focus, communicate vision, and align multidisciplinary teams around priorities
- Excellent communication and stakeholder-management skills
- Fluency in English
- Willingness to travel as needed
- Advanced business or leadership education
- Experience in Honeywell Aerospace or another safety-critical, regulated industry
- Polish language capability
- Experience working across cultures
The Aerospace Corporation Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about The Aerospace Corporation and has not been reviewed or approved by The Aerospace Corporation.
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Retirement Support — The 401(k) plan provides a company‑paid contribution of 8–12% based on years of service with immediate eligibility and vesting, and eligible employees can access retiree medical benefits.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Paid time off includes 15 vacation days (rising to 20 after five years), nine paid holidays, and unlimited sick time for exempt employees with accruals for non‑exempt staff.
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Flexible Benefits — Flexible work models include a 9/80 schedule with alternating Fridays off, supported by backup care services, an EAP, relocation assistance, and home‑office stipends where applicable.
The Aerospace Corporation Insights
What We Do
The space enterprise has been transformed by rapid change and growth. New vehicles for national security space, a more rapid launch cadence, proliferated satellite constellations, the pursuit of interplanetary exploration, and thriving commercial ventures are changing the nature of the space industry. The Aerospace Corporation (Aerospace) is a leading architect for U.S. space programs, shaping efforts to outpace threats to our national security while cultivating the technologies needed to further this new era of space commercialization and exploration. Aerospace works across the space enterprise in service of the public interest. In addition to supporting the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community, our customers include NASA, NOAA, numerous federal agencies, and commercial space — all of whom benefit from our deep technical knowledge. We only pursue business related to the space mission and complementary fields, operating as the nation’s trusted partner to solve the toughest challenges and develop reliable and innovative technologies. Innovation in space occurs when people have the freedom to imagine and do. At Aerospace, we take pride in our readiness to solve some of the most complex challenges in the space enterprise.
Why Work With Us
We are a non-profit corporation chartered by the government to work on the hardest problems in space. We employ technical experts in every discipline of space-related science and engineering who touch every part of the US space program. Come join us as we make an impact bigger than ourselves.
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