Director of Engineering & Platform

Reporting toVP Cargo Management Portfolio

Location: United Kingdom (Preferred)

While the United Kingdom is the preferred location for this role, we embrace a flexible approach and welcome applications from talented professionals based in Luxembourg, Spain, Czech Republic, subject to local employment requirements.

We are building the next generation of cargo management applications as a modern, cloud-hosted SaaS platform (Neo), and we are looking for an exceptional engineering leader to own the technology, platform and engineering organization behind it.

We are currently looking for a Director of Engineering & Platform to join the Cargo Business Unit leadership team.

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.

• 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.

• 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 data centres + AWS): hosting model, regions, multi-tenancy, resilience, disaster recovery and security posture.
• Own cloud cost and a Fin Ops 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 Dev Ops 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.

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…