Chief Engineer, Global Data Management

Jeppesen ForeFlight Careers•Austin, TX

About The Position

Jeppesen ForeFlight is seeking a senior technical leader for its Global Data organization. The Chief Engineer will partner directly with Global Data leadership to shape technical strategy, improve execution and engineering quality, and accelerate modernization of data platforms, pipelines, products, and the operating model. This is a high-leverage technical leadership role—not solely a people-management position—requiring the ability to connect strategy to execution, align cross-functional teams, identify technical risks, improve decision-making, and help teams move forward with clarity. The ideal candidate is AI-forward, deeply technical, operationally sharp, and comfortable working through ambiguity. They bring knowledge of data-intensive systems, software engineering, architecture, automation, and product delivery. Aviation data experience is strongly preferred, but is not required for an exceptional technical leader with strong systems thinking and a builder mindset. Jeppesen ForeFlight provides aviation software solutions for Commercial, Business, Military, and General Aviation customers globally. The company combines Jeppesen’s aeronautical data legacy with ForeFlight’s aviation technology expertise to deliver tools intended to enhance safety, improve operational efficiency, and support decision-making.

Requirements

15+ years of experience in software engineering, data engineering, platform engineering, architecture, or technical leadership.
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 applying AI to engineering, data quality, automation, analytics, knowledge workflows, developer productivity, or intelligent products.
Ability to simplify complex technical issues into clear decisions, priorities, and executive-level narratives.
Experience improving engineering execution, including 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, with the ability to engage deeply with engineers and communicate clearly with executives.
Builder mindset, including willingness to prototype, inspect systems directly, ask sharp questions, and turn ambiguity into forward motion.
High judgment, low ego, and a strong bias for practical outcomes.

Nice To Haves

Aviation data experience.

Responsibilities

Serve as the senior technical partner to Global Data leadership, translating 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 by clarifying goals, structuring work, identifying dependencies, unblocking teams, and ensuring execution quality.
Partner with Engineering, Product, Data Production, Architecture, Security, Operations, Customer Success, and business leaders to align roadmaps, 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 Global Data.
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 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.