Two Chief Systems Engineers, Top Secret Clearance

Case study · BAE Systems · New Hampshire, US · By the Axe Talent team

By the time the brief reached Natalia Rostova and her team, BAE Systems had already worked the local market dry. Their internal recruiters had contacted every cleared systems engineer within reach of the New Hampshire site. Two Chief Systems Engineer seats stayed open. Both roles were filled. One of those hires made Director within a year.

Three walls

The candidate had to hold an active Top Secret clearance. That alone cuts the American engineering workforce down to a small fraction. The role was on site in New Hampshire, which removes remote work and most of the map. And the base salary followed a defense pay scale, sitting below what the same engineer earns in the private sector.

Each wall is survivable alone. Together they produce a familiar outcome: months of interviews with candidates who fail the clearance check, and a program running late.

The team stopped searching New Hampshire

A Top Secret clearance travels with the person. Natalia and her team took that seriously and searched the whole country for cleared engineers living in expensive states, where a New Hampshire salary buys a different life. For those candidates the pay cut on paper turned into a raise in practice, and the program itself was worth the move.

The offer needed the same treatment. Base pay was locked, so the team negotiated with BAE HR on everything around it: a sign-on bonus, an enhanced relocation package, and PhD tuition reimbursement. An engineer comparing two numbers says no. An engineer comparing a move, a program, a funded doctorate and a lower cost of living says yes.

What happened

Both Chief Systems Engineer roles were filled. Within a year, one of the two was promoted to Director.

"I highly recommend working with Natalia as a candidate, and I would certainly retain her at my company in the future for help with staffing critical technical and leadership positions."

Shawn Mizener, Chief Engineer at BAE Systems US

What the firm kept from it

Cleared engineers write resumes that read like redacted documents: program names shrink to customer initials, achievements keep their verbs and lose their objects. Learning to read those pages taught this team to work from evidence. The same habit now runs our university searches, where the evidence is a publication record and the discipline is identical.

Start a search like this

Write to Natalia Rostova, Axe Talent Founder & Executive Headhunter, or book 20 minutes on Natalia's Calendar. More on the method: aerospace and defense search.