OverviewCompany: Dropla (Danish-Ukrainian defence tech)Location: Kolding/Odense, Denmark (On-site, workshop-based)Type: Full-time, permanent About the RoleWe are building unmanned ground vehicles and edge-AI detection systems, and we have reached the point where engineering has to become a function rather than a group of capable individuals. This role owns that transition. The Head of Engineering owns the platform architecture across mechanical, electrical, software and payload interfaces; the engineering process from requirements through validation to release; the technical release authority that decides what ships; and the hiring and development of the specialist engineers below. This person is also the technical counterpart to demanding professional customers, and the one who puts technical risk in front of the CEO and board in terms they can act on. RESPONSIBILITIES■ Define and maintain platform architecture and interface definitions so that four engineering disciplines converge rather than collide.■ Implement and enforce a release gate: redesign, prototype, test, validate, then production — including refusing release when the test evidence is not there.■ Establish configuration management — what is released, what is fitted to which vehicle serial number, and what changed between them.■ Convert product priorities into a resourced, dated engineering plan and report against it without decoration.■ Recruit, onboard and develop the specialist engineering team across two Danish sites, and coordinate technical direction with the engineering centre abroad.■ Represent engineering to customers, procurement authorities, integration partners and auditors. MUST HAVE■ MSc or BSc in mechanical, electrical, mechatronic, production or systems engineering.■ 10+ years in hardware product engineering, including at least 3–5 years of line management — leading engineers, not only being the most senior one.■ Has personally taken a complex electromechanical product from design through validation into serial production, and owned the release decision.■ Cross-disciplinary fluency: able to competently challenge a mechanical, an electrical and an embedded-software engineer in the same review without being the specialist in any of them.■ Has introduced engineering process into a company that had none — requirements, change control, configuration management, test and release — without burying a small team in bureaucracy.■ Background in vehicles, robotics, off-highway machinery, marine, aerospace or defence hardware.■ Strong enough to hold a release gate under commercial pressure, including from the CEO.■ Professional English: work authorisation in Denmark; eligible for Danish and NATO security clearance. Advantageous (Nice to Have)■ Danish language; familiarity with Danish and NATO defence procurement and acceptance practice.■ Experience with unmanned systems, autonomy stacks, teleoperation or resilient communication links.■ Has scaled an engineering organisation from single digits past twenty people.■ Exposure to CE marking, MIL-STD or STANAG qualification testing.■ Experience running engineering across two sites or two countries.■ Prior work in a venture-funded company, with board-level technical reporting.