Support Engineering Manager

Job Description

Your impact

We are looking for a Support Engineering Manager to lead our obsolescence management capability across a wide range of products and services within our Customer Support and Service Solution (CS3) Line of Business. This is a strategic leadership role combining functional ownership, technical oversight and people leadership.

CS3 operates across the UK and overseas, supporting critical technologies and systems on air, land and sea platforms, ensuring their readiness and availability to underpin national security. We are proud to be the largest supplier of avionic support to the UK MoD and a trusted partner for our customers worldwide, providing innovative and invaluable support solutions.

You will help ensure long-term platform availability, mitigating supply chain and component risk, and protecting in-service capability. Working in close partnership with the Supportability Engineering Manager, you will also help strengthen our support modelling, contribute to bids, and enhance our overall through-life support strategy.

This role offers the opportunity to shape both current programme performance and the next generation of support solutions, while developing a high-performing engineering team.

• Partnering with the Supportability Engineering Manager to create a support engineering organisation that:

• Enables growth and development of capability within CS3
• Provides the people with career development opportunities and a sense of belonging
• Brings recognised technical expertise to the programmes where it’s needed
• Defining and maintaining a structured, proactive approach to obsolescence management aligned with contractual and regulatory requirements
• Supporting informed decision-making through clear analysis of cost, risk and operational impact, providing regular visibility of risk exposure and mitigation plans to programme stakeholders
• Helping improve modelling tools, forecasting approaches and data quality and promoting data-led decision-making across the lifecycle
• Contributing technically to the creation of in-service support strategies, bids and proposals, both within CS3 and within the product lines of business
• Encouraging knowledge sharing and consistent application of best practice, both from within the company and from wider industry
• Building strong, collaborative working relationships across internal teams, external partners and customers
• Ensuring that appropriate governance is applied and that our obsolescence management processes are robust and fit for purpose
• Identifying opportunities for continuous improvement in support engineering practices, leveraging work being done both within CS3 and at a UK level.

We are interested in hearing from you if you have a combination of the following:

• Experience in support engineering or through-life systems engineering within complex, regulated environments (defence experience beneficial)
• Demonstrated experience managing obsolescence and lifecycle risk
• Experience leading and developing engineering teams
• Ability to build trusted relationships with customers and internal stakeholders, gaining credibility through communicating complex technical concepts and risks clearly and constructively
• A demonstrated customer focus with the ability to balance customer expectations, contractual commitments and engineering realities in a pragmatic and transparent way
• Strong analytical skills and understanding of support, cost or availability modelling and forecasting
• Experience of using insights and evidence to challenge existing approaches constructively and drive improvement
• Experience contributing to the engineering aspects of bids or commercial proposals is desirable

This is not an exhaustive list, and we are keen to hear from you even if you might not have experience in all the above. The most important skill is a good attitude and willingness to learn.

This role is subject to pre-employment screening in line with the UK Government’s Baseline Personnel Security Standard (BPSS). An additional range of Personnel Security Controls referred to as National Security Vetting (NSV) may apply, this…