Chief Engineer, Global Data

ForeFlight•Centennial, CO

11h•$208,000 - $255,000

About The Position

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. 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.

Requirements

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.

Nice To Haves

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.

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.