Principal Solutions Engineer

Position:  Principal Solutions Engineer (Electronic Security & Critical Communications) (Job ID: 4579)

Location:
Chesapeake, VA
Remote Status: On-Site
Job Id:  4579
# of Openings:  1 Principal Solutions Engineer Position Summary:
* The Principal Solutions Engineer is the senior technical authority for how the organization designs, proposes, standardizes, and improves its solutions. The role spans the division's markets, including Electronic Security Systems (ESS), critical power systems, communications infrastructure, and mission systems, for Federal and non-Federal customers. It is a horizontal individual-contributor position assigned by the Director wherever the division requires technical definition, standards, solution development, or process improvement. The Principal Solutions Engineer works across programs, engineering, production, quality, Business Development, and enterprise shared services and exercises cross-functional technical leadership without replacing functional management or designated engineering release authority.
* Fully onsite in Chesapeake, VA.

Job Description
Technical Architecture & Solution Development
* Define system architectures and reference designs for the division's solution families and establish the platforms, components, configurations, and technical approaches from which repeatable solutions are built.
* Develop the technical basis for bids and projects, including requirements traceability, design calculations, capacity analysis, cybersecurity substantiation, bills of material, and basis-of-estimate inputs.
* Translate customer, contractual, operational, cybersecurity, and infrastructure requirements into integrated, executable technical solutions.
* Evaluate new technologies, platforms, manufacturers, and partners for technical fit, compliance, interoperability, lifecycle risk, supportability, and cost implications.
* Advise senior leadership on technology direction, technical investment, capability gaps, and expansion into new markets or solution areas. Proposal & Capture Support
* Serve as lead technical author or independent technical reviewer on strategic pursuits, translating solicitation requirements into compliant, defensible, and executable technical volumes.
* Develop and maintain the division's proposal engineering methods, including requirements extraction, compliance matrices, design registers, verification checks, assumptions, and technical review gates.
* Partner with Business Development, Program Management, Engineering, estimating, contracts, and other contributors to ensure proposed solutions align with customer requirements and can be successfully executed after award.
* Support pricing analysis and win strategy with technical input, including technical cost drivers, price-to-win considerations, competitor solution assessment, and lessons learned from awards and losses.
* Provide independent technical challenge to proposed solutions and identify unresolved requirements, technical risk, execution risk, or unsupported assumptions before submission. Engineering Standards & Configuration
* Own and maintain the division's master bills of material, standard configurations, estimating standards, reference designs, and calculation methods, keeping them current for lifecycle, compliance, availability, and pricing.
* Establish standards for how designs are documented, verified, reviewed, and prepared for release in coordination with the Engineering technical authority, which retains formal design-release approval.
* Establish configuration-control expectations for reusable technical content, approved solution components, design assumptions, calculations, and estimating inputs.
* Transfer standards, templates, tools, reference designs, and supporting documentation into controlled organizational libraries with defined ownership and maintenance responsibilities.
* Drive consistency across programs while allowing documented project-specific deviations when customer, site, contractual, or technical conditions require them. Process Improvement, Tools & Automation
* Lead approved cross-functional transformation initiatives from intake
- including sponsor, desired outcome, success metric, scope, and ownership
- through execution, validation, and handoff to the owning function.
* Develop software tools and automation that make engineering, proposal, and operational processes repeatable, including scripted extraction and reconciliation of documents and workbooks, generators for estimates and registers, and data analysis over bid and project records.
* Develop and apply AI-assisted workflows with appropriate human verification, data-handling controls, traceability, and quality checks.
* Use project startup, execution results, proposal outcomes, lessons learned, and quality findings to identify root causes and feed corrective improvements back into standards, tools, and processes.
* Report initiative status, measurable results, unresolved dependencies, and handoff