Mission:
Own the technology, platform and engineering capability of the Cargo BU. As one of the BU’s top-layer leaders, the Director sets engineering strategy and standards, owns the cloud-hosted Neo platform end-to-end — including its hosting strategy, reliability and cost — governs internal and partner engineering teams to a single quality bar, and makes the BU an AI-led engineering organisation that both builds with AI and embeds AI into the products our customers use.
Responsibilities and Accountabilities:
Technology Leadership & Strategy
- Set the multi-year engineering and technology strategy for the Cargo BU, aligned to the product roadmap and the BU’s growth ambition.
- Own the technical architecture, patterns, frameworks and engineering standards applied consistently across all product domains and teams.
- Make and own key technology and make-vs-buy decisions for shared and platform capabilities; balance investment in resilience, performance and cost against delivery pressure, and make the trade-offs visible to BU leadership and EXCO.
- Provide visible technical leadership and credibility — set direction the strongest engineers respect, and represent engineering in BU strategy, planning and customer conversations.
- Drive continuous improvement in delivery quality, efficiency and cost through process, tooling and architectural change.
Platform, Cloud & Hosting Strategy
- Own the architecture, scalability, security and operational health of the Neo SaaS platform and its shared services.
- Own the cloud hosting strategy across our hybrid estate (private datacentres + AWS): hosting model, regions, multi-tenancy, resilience, disaster recovery and security posture.
- Own cloud cost and a FinOps culture — instil cost awareness and accountability across teams; drive right-sizing, reserved/committed-use commitments, idle-resource elimination, and cost-per-customer/per-tenant visibility so growth scales economically.
- Own CI/CD, environments, release tooling and the DevOps practice; drive deployment frequency, lead time and reliability; define and track platform SLAs/SLOs and own production incident management for shared services.
- Own a single, visible technical-debt backlog and ensure it is funded and burned down rather than ignored.
AI – Led Engineering & AI in our Products
Making CHAMP an AI-led engineering organisation is a top priority for this role.
- Build an AI-first engineering culture: drive adoption of AI coding assistants, AI-assisted code review, automated test generation and intelligent monitoring to raise developer productivity and quality.
- Set the policies and guardrails for responsible AI use in engineering — security, data leakage, IP protection, access controls and approval workflows.
- Partner with Product to embed AI capabilities into the Neo product portfolio (e.g. intelligent automation, decision support, anomaly detection and AI-driven insights for air-cargo customers), and own the platform foundations (data, MLOps/AI tooling, inference hosting and cost) that make this possible.
- Keep the organisation current as AI engineering practices evolve and build the team’s AI capability through hiring and upskilling.
Engineering Delivery & Standards
- Ensure development scope is planned, implemented and delivered as committed, to agreed plans with product and project management, with functional and technical quality.
- Ensure the right level of skills and capacity is developed to meet development demands on time and to standard across programs such as Cargospot/UXR.
- Work with architecture and development teams to ensure performant, robust software; ensure teams both implement and contribute to the architectural strategy and product roadmap.
- Liaise with Product Managers, Architects and technical leads to ensure requirements are properly specified, aligned with architecture and product strategy, and appropriately estimated and planned into releases.
- Proactively identify and manage risks, issues, blocking points and changes; facilitate impact assessment and prioritisation with stakeholders.
- Ensure teams support testing and product support within agreed priorities and SLAs, with quality and customer focus.
Team Management
- Lead the Cargo BU engineering organisation (~100 headcount) across CHAMP geographies — primarily London, Luxembourg and Philippines — including a team of Engineering Managers and the governance of external/partner developers.
- Provide leadership and direction, growing and nurturing a high-performing, collaborative, innovative and customer-focused software engineering culture.
- Lead and motivate multi-disciplinary, geographically distributed and multi-cultural teams.
- Own the developer career framework, levelling and hiring bar; supervise organisational development, recruiting and career development in conjunction with HR.
- Define and support the staff retention plan aligned with CHAMP objectives.
Working with Other Departments
- Work closely with Product Managers to ensure software development progresses towards the CHAMP product roadmap.
- Work closely with Architects to ensure development adheres to technical standards and the enterprise architecture strategy.
- Work closely with IT to ensure technology tooling enables efficient development and that products are deployed in line with CHAMP’s technology implementation strategy.
- Facilitate, enable and enforce a constructive, collaborative cross-department environment to encourage innovation and achieve organisational targets.
- Establish and maintain relationships with external suppliers as appropriate — e.g. recruitment agencies, training providers, software product vendors, IT consultants and service providers.
Knowledge, Skills and Abilities
- Proven experience leading engineering and delivering application/SaaS products on time and to quality for a large, international customer base.
- Strong technology leadership presence with a positive, proactive leadership style and the technical depth to set architecture direction.
- Ability to systematically break complex, ambiguous problems into manageable pieces, deep dive into detail, then step back to the big picture and customer value.
- Disciplined and process-driven, with non-negotiable standards of performance and quality.
- In-depth experience of Agile, Scrum and Lean software engineering best practices.
Technology environment (fluency expected; hands-on depth in several):
- Backend services in Java, Spring Boot, Web Services with Oracle / SQL Server / MongoDB; integration with core Java cargo applications via REST APIs.
- Frontends in Angular and the Ionic framework for mobile apps.
- Deployment to Linux servers, private datacentres and AWS using Ansible & Maven; CI/CD with GitLab / Bamboo.
- Cloud architecture and operations on AWS (or equivalent), with strong DevOps, CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code practice; FinOps / cloud cost management.
- Familiarity with Kafka, NGINX, load balancing and ELK; and with modern AI/ML engineering tooling and AI-assisted development.
Education and Experience
- Bachelor’s degree (or equivalent) in Information Technology, Computer Science, Computer Engineering or related field; advanced degree a plus.
- 12+ years of relevant software engineering experience across the full lifecycle, from requirements through product support.
- 8+ years in engineering leadership, including line and program/project management at director or equivalent level, in a large, at-scale, global, multi-cultural environment.
- Demonstrable experience owning a cloud-hosted SaaS platform end-to-end, including hosting strategy and cost ownership.
- Experience leading AI adoption in engineering and/or embedding AI into products is strongly preferred.
- Experience governing large external/offshore development partners against quality and delivery outcomes.
- Excellent analytical, problem-solving and interpersonal skills; good command of English is a must.
The selected candidate may be subject to the provision of an up-to-date (not older than 3 months) criminal record certificate.
