BIO & CONTACT CARD
James Stevens | Principal Consultant
James Stevens is a Principal Consultant at Optimise Engineering, bringing more than twenty years of systems engineering experience, delivering complex, safety critical capabilities across defence, aerospace and maritime domains. His career blends deep technical expertise with strategic leadership, enabling organisations to optimise engineering performance, strengthen governance, and deliver robust, future ready systems. Beginning his career as an Engineering Officer in the Royal Air Force, James was responsible for the airworthiness and operational readiness of the Eurofighter Typhoon fleet, leading teams of up to 180 personnel and managing high tempo maintenance, deployment and upgrade activities.
His work included rapid aircraft generation for operations, fleet modifications for national security tasks, and leading lean improvement initiatives across ground support engineering. James later joined QinetiQ as a Systems Engineer, where first worked on the IBM® DOORS Classic toolset where he used it to develop safety cases related to the RAF Eurofighter Typhoon. This included work on the environmental, crew escape systems, air to air refuelling trials and gunfire vibration analysis.
James then went onto serve as the Head of Systems Engineering at SEA for 7 years, where he lead a discipline of approximately 70 engineers. He has delivered major organisational improvements including the deployment of IBM® DOORS® Next and the wider IBM® Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) toolset, the complete rewrite of SEA’s engineering lifecycle aligned to ISO 15288, and integration of Secure by Design principles.
He has overseen the integration and international trials of lightweight towed sonar arrays, delivered business cases for PLM and MBSE adoption, chaired key design reviews, and represented SEA on the IfSE UK Advisory Board. His leadership helped strengthen systems governance, digital engineering capability, and competency development across the organisation. James holds a BEng in Mechanical Engineering, is a Certified Systems Engineering Professional (CSEP), a qualified ISO 9001/9100 internal auditor, and has completed specialist training including Air Systems Trials Engineering, Sonar Fundamentals, Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and SysML v2.
He maintains an active commitment to professional development through INCOSE, IBM® and Institute for Systems Engineering (IfSE) conferences, ongoing research into MBSE deployment and AI enabled systems engineering. Across his career, James has built a reputation for technical rigour, strategic leadership, and an ability to deliver engineering outcomes in high risk, multidisciplinary and operationally demanding environments. His work continues to focus on advancing systems engineering practice, strengthening digital integration, and enabling organisations to deliver safe, effective and future ready systems.
Contact Card
James would love to hear directly from Customers, Community Colleagues, Suppliers and other business Stakeholders.
Email: James.Stevens@optimise-engineering.co.uk
HQ Telephone: +44 (0) 1529 717369
DDI Telephone: +44 (0) 7421560993