FOE wins work by moving faster than the government expects and speaking the government’s language better than our competitors do. That requires someone who has lived on the other side of the table: a former NAVSEA, warfare center, or similar acquisition professional who can take a customer’s capability need and drive it through top-level requirements, derived system requirements, and a test and evaluation plan, then walk it back up through verification without dropping a thread.
Today that work is distributed across growth, programs, and engineering. Nobody owns it. This hire owns it. You sit at the junction of all three, shaping captures with technically credible solutions, translating won work into executable requirements baselines, and making sure what engineering builds is what the customer can accept, test, and field.
One boundary, stated plainly, is that programs at FOE sit under the CGO while product sits under the Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Engineering owns the product. This role owns the customer requirement and the program’s obligation to meet it. You align product to program; you do not design the product. The tension between those two lanes is deliberate and productive, and this role works inside it, not around it.
If you are the right hire, you have spent years inside a Navy systems command, warfare center, or equivalent acquisition organization. You know how a requirement becomes a contract line item. You have personally authored or approved requirements documents, SRVMs, and T&E plans that survived government gate reviews. Furthermore, you still have the relationships with program office, warfare center, and technical authority contacts who return your calls.