Job Description

Leidos is seeking a qualified professional to lead a high-performance team researching and developing aircraft protection technologies for the US Air Force. In this role, you and your team members will help our customers address their demanding challenges. You will work with your technical teams, other subject matter experts, and business development staff, to develop and apply optimal and differentiated Leidos solutions in the technical areas of aircraft threat countermeasures. You will have direct program management responsibility for classified research and development contracts as well as responsibility for all contract activities being performed in your Branch.

Primary Responsibilities

• Managing the Threat Countermeasures Branch to ensure customer research and development requirements are being met.

• Managing one or more DoD contracted research and development efforts

• Collaborating with your Branch staff, customer organizations, and other parts of Leidos to develop differentiated solutions resulting in new business opportunities

• Ensuring all contracts within your Branch are executed properly within budget and on schedule

• Establishing Leidos best practices, lessons learned, and technological approaches related to threat sensing, threat countermeasures, modeling and simulation are pursued

• Line management of multiple teams with a total of over 30 highly technical staff

• Managing and reporting on Branch financial performance against established annual goals

• Pursuing opportunities to propose solutions that will address the challenges of current and future Branch customers

Basic Qualifications

• U.S. citizen with an active Top Secret/SCI clearance.

• Experience in at least one or more of the following: Electro-optic (EO) and/or infrared sensing, IR threat countermeasures, threat countermeasure modeling and simulation, and foreign threat exploitation.

• Master’s degree with at least 15 years of prior relevant experience or PhD with at least 13 years of prior relevant experience in engineering or physics.

• Strong technical breadth and depth in support of relevant government markets

• Experience as a program manager of government research and development contracts

• Demonstrated technical leadership

Preferred Qualifications

• Hardware-in-the-loop testing experience.Demonstrated ability to author, present, and articulate requirements and associated solutions in settings supporting customers and business development

• Experience in customer relationship building

NKE

If you're looking for comfort, keep scrolling. At Leidos, we outthink, outbuild, and outpace the status quo — because the mission demands it. We're not hiring followers. We're recruiting the ones who disrupt, provoke, and refuse to fail. Step 10 is ancient history. We're already at step 30 — and moving faster than anyone else dares.

Original Posting:

March 30, 2026

For U.S. Positions: While subject to change based on business needs, Leidos reasonably anticipates that this job requisition will remain open for at least 3 days with an anticipated close date of no earlier than 3 days after the original posting date as listed above.

Pay Range:

Pay Range $154,050.00 - $278,475.00

The Leidos pay range for this job level is a general guideline only and not a guarantee of compensation or salary. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include (but are not limited to) responsibilities of the job, education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity, alignment with market data, applicable bargaining agreement (if any), or other law.