Lead AI Enablement Engineer, Aerospace Programs

About the role

Archer is building the Midnight aircraft on an aggressive program timeline, and our aerospace engineering teams - structures, GN&C, propulsion, avionics, flight test, certification - are where the schedule is won or lost. A lot of the work that gates those teams is still manual: stitching data between tools, writing one-off scripts that take a week, generating reports by hand, waiting on someone else to build a piece of internal tooling that should have taken an afternoon. This role exists to change that. You will own AI tooling adoption across the aerospace engineering org as a senior individual contributor - setting the strategy, building the playbook, shipping the early proofs yourself, and steadily levering the org until AI-assisted workflows are a default part of how every engineer works. Think Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, agentic workflows, custom internal tools built on LLMs. You are not an AI researcher. You are a senior aerospace engineer who has become genuinely obsessed with what these tools can do, and whose job is to compress program timelines by getting that leverage into every team that needs it. This is a senior staff / principal-level role. You'll operate with significant autonomy, set direction for an area the company is investing in heavily, and be expected to make the case to engineering leadership about where to push next. You will not manage people directly, but your influence over how the aerospace org works will be substantial. Success looks like an aerospace engineering org where AI-assisted workflows are unremarkable - where the analyst who used to spend three days on a post-processing pipeline now ships it in an afternoon, where the test engineer who can't code is shipping their own tools, and where weeks of calendar time have come out of the critical path because of work you enabled.

Responsibilities

• Own the strategy for AI tooling adoption across aerospace engineering. Decide where the leverage is, build the multi-quarter roadmap, and make the case to engineering leadership for where to invest.
• Embed with aerospace teams (structures, GN&C, propulsion, avionics, flight test, certification, manufacturing engineering) to find the workflows where AI tooling unlocks the biggest gains. Sit with engineers. Watch what they do. Find the slow parts.
• Build the first version yourself. When a team has a manual process that's been "the way we do it" for years, write the prototype tool that replaces it - usually in days, not quarters. Demonstrate what's possible, then hand it off or productize it.
• Run enablement at every level - onboarding sessions, office hours, async docs, 1:1 coaching with senior engineers and directors. Teach engineers how to think with these tools, not just type commands into them.
• Mentor and force-multiply. Identify AI-curious engineers inside aerospace teams, equip them as local champions, and turn them into the leverage that lets you scale beyond what one person could touch directly.
• Maintain the internal toolkit: prompt libraries, starter templates, internal MCP servers, and reference implementations tailored to aerospace engineering workflows.
• Partner with IT, security, and the export control team to make sure everything you ship is compliant with ITAR, data handling, and IP requirements.
• Track adoption and impact rigorously. Cycle-time savings, tools shipped, engineers onboarded, workflows automated. Report the numbers up to engineering leadership and use them to prioritize the next bet.
• Stay on the frontier. Try every new model, agent, IDE integration, and harness as it comes out. Be the person - for the whole company - who knows what's actually possible this quarter, not last year.

Requirements

• Required:
• BS or higher in mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, or an equivalent physical-systems discipline. You need to understand the actual work - loads analysis, test data, control systems, CAD/CAE pipelines - because credibility with senior aerospace engineers is non-negotiable.
• 8+ years working in an engineering role on physical systems (aerospace, defense, automotive, robotics, advanced manufacturing), with a track record of impact that justifies a senior staff / principal-level hire. Years matter less than the slope; we're hiring for the bar, not the tenur

Additional Information

Archer is an aerospace company based in San Jose, California building an all-electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft with a mission to advance the benefits of sustainable air mobility. We are designing, manufacturing, and operating an all-electric aircraft that can carry four passengers while producing minimal noise. Our sights are set high and our problems are hard, and we believe that diversity in the workplace is what makes us smarter, drives better insights, and will ultimately lift us all to success. We are dedicated to cultivating an equitable and inclusive environment that embraces our differences, and supports and celebrates all of our team members.

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