Engineering Manager

About Us

We build mission-critical software for the defence and aerospace sectors. Our teams bring together software engineers, RF and electronics specialists, and domain experts to deliver turnkey solutions for problems with no off-the-shelf answer, across tactical radios, radar systems, and applied research.

Much of our work sits around the systems that produce signal and sensor data — building the software that generates, validates, analyses, and visualises that data at scale. The common thread is volume under time pressure, and interfaces that let operators and analysts act on what they are seeing immediately.

About the Role

We're looking for an Engineering Manager(8+ years) to lead a team delivering across several concurrent projects, own the technical direction they share, and line-manage the engineers doing the work.

You'll own system design, drive delivery, review designs and code, and keep a substantial piece of the build yourself. Alongside that you carry the people responsibilities for your team: 1:1s, feedback, performance and career development, and hiring. This is a technical role with a management dimension — we expect you to stay a practising engineer.

What You'll Do

System design & architecture

• Own technical direction across the team's projects, keeping design decisions coherent between them.
• Make sure the team's pipelines hold up as data volume, concurrent sources, and complexity grow.
• Hold the bar on your engineers designs — consequential calls made deliberately and documented.

Hands-on engineering

• Own one substantial piece of delivery yourself at a time — deliberately chosen so it keeps your technical judgement current without making you the bottleneck.
• Stay close enough to the code that your reviews are useful and your calls stay grounded in it.

Project execution

• Turn requirements into a technical design and an execution plan the team can work against.
• Break work into workstreams, sequence by risk and dependency, and manage resourcing.
• Track progress, surface risk early, and own technical outcomes across the full lifecycle.

Technical leadership & team management

• Set technical direction, and review designs and code as a teaching mechanism rather than a gate.
• Line-manage your engineers — regular 1:1s, clear feedback, and honest performance conversations.
• Own career development: understand where each engineer wants to get to, and create the work and support that takes them there.
• Hire: shape the bar, run interviews, and make the case to the candidates you want.

Cross-functional partnership

• Work with data scientists, electronics engineers, UI/UX, and product to align on programme goals.
• Represent the team's position to stakeholders, and keep leadership informed on progress and risk.

What We're Looking For

Must-haves

• Still hands-on while managing. You've run a team without going stale technically — you can point to something you designed or built recently.
• System design at scale. You've shipped systems where architecture was the deciding factor, and can walk us through the tradeoffs you weighed.
• Delivery through a team. You've been accountable for what a team delivered — planning across concurrent workstreams, and keeping delivery predictable when priorities shift.
• Management experience. You've line-managed engineers — 1:1s, feedback, performance and career conversations — and can point to people who grew under you. Hiring experience ideally.
• Languages. Hands-on in one or more of C++, C# or Python, with enough familiarity with React or Angular to review frontend work. We work across projects with different stacks, so breadth counts.
• Core stack. Comfortable across microservices, real-time data processing, event streaming and caching (Kafka, Redis, or equivalents), and data-heavy frontends — fluent enough to review credibly.
• Experience. Bachelor's in Computer Science, Electronics, or equivalent practical experience, plus 8+ years including demonstrated experience leading and managing engineers.

Nice to have

• Exposure to defence, aerospace, or another mission-critical regulated domain.
• Experience managing a team through a difficult delivery — a slipped programme, a re-architecture, a team that needed rebuilding.
• Experience with time-series data stores, or binary / columnar formats for moving large datasets efficiently.
• Familiarity with sensor or signal-data concepts — enough to hold a productive conversation with our electronics engineers.

Why Join Us

• Problems that resist easy answers. Real-time constraints, large-scale sensor data, and operational reliability requirements — on systems that get used.
• Architectural ownership, with a team behind it. Real design authority, plus the people and the mandate to see the decisions through.
• Management that doesn't cost you your technical edge. Staying hands-on is part of the job here, not something you negotiate for.