DDCC Head of Engineering

At Thales, we focus on building and delivering robust, real-world AI and Data solutions that make a tangible impact for our customers—and society  global cortAIx initiative unites over 600 AI and data specialists dedicated to developing trusted, operationally effective AI-powered systems for some of the most challenging and complex environments. In the UK, CortAIx is accelerating this mission by fostering technology, talent, and research focused on ethical, transparent, and explainable AI.

DDCC is Thales UK’s Digital and Data Competence Centre. This includes 3 primary areas of activity:

• cortAIx UK & Enterprise AI:
  Our AI incubation and industrialisation accelerator for deployed and enterprise AI solutions
• Data Enablement:
  Delivering foundational data tools, processes and architectures to support generation of value from data at pace
• Sovereign Cloud:
  Delivering cloud native platform solutions for Thales UK development and production activities

The DDCC Head of Engineering role is focused on technical management of engineering activities primarily supporting cortAIx UK. They manage and monitor the solution engineering activities and the teams in terms of development process, practices and tools strategies across DDCC engineering activities

We’re looking for an experienced Software Engineer who understands architecture and can provide cross functional leadership to a small, technical complex team to drive developments. This is very much a hands-on position
, leading solution delivery by working with teams across Software, Systems, IVVQ, AI and Machine Learning.

We need a solution provider, a force multiplier whose expertise sit in the delivery management of technical solutions but also can manage a small team of functional leaders and understands software architecture within safety critical environments.

Due to the nature of the work, we require the successful individual to be able to hold UK EYES ONLY Security clearance. See below for further details.

As DDCC Head of Engineering, your remit will cover:

• Stakeholder management: 1st point of contact for customer technical requirements/escalation points for scrum teams
• Governance: enforce technical direction; resolve cross-team conflicts.
• Change management: improving engineering effectiveness (e.g., test maturity, CI reliability, coding standards).
• Communication: translate leadership communication and analyse/describe impact to roadmap and trade-offs.
• Cross-team integration: coordinating platform, software, test/automation and support needs
• Quality, Safety, Cyber Assurance: verification strategy, traceability, defect management and Project Design Authority co-ordination/delivery
• Process/tooling: CI/CD for embedded, static analysis, unit/integration test frameworks, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing, configuration management.
• Risk management:
  
  project technical risks reviews and management in conjunction AIDM

Strategic Leadership

• Develop and execute the engineering strategy for AI products and platforms.
• Accountable for the technology roadmaps aligned to business objectives.
• Partner with executive leadership to identify and prioritise AI opportunities.
• Build a culture of innovation, experimentation, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Act as a trusted advisor on emerging AI technologies, trends, and risks.

Engineering Leadership

• Lead, coach, and develop Engineering Managers, Principal Engineers, AI Engineers and SW Engineers
• Build and scale high-performing, diverse engineering teams.
• Establish engineering standards, architecture principles, and delivery practices.
• Drive operational excellence across reliability, security, performance, and scalability.
• Foster a strong engineering…