Engineering Manager, Embedded Software

Engineering Manager, Embedded Software at Helvar

We’re looking for an engineering leader to manage, grow, and inspire our embedded software team, and to help us build a more unified, higher‑performing engineering culture across our sites. The priority is people leadership, engineering leadership, and delivery ownership. You’ll coordinate delivery, raise the bar on how we build embedded software, and lead the team through real change.

This matters most because we’re building the next generation of our offering – an end‑to‑end system that spans hardware, embedded, IoT, and cloud. That program lives or dies on alignment, coordination, and cross‑team collaboration, so we need a leader who understands how the whole system fits together, not just their own layer.

We believe high performance and genuine care for people reinforce each other rather than compete: teams that feel trusted, belong to something, and are led by example deliver their best work. We want someone who is excited by transforming an engineering organisation into a high‑performing one, who can instil a sense of community and belonging, and who leads from the front.

This person must be able to coordinate engineering delivery, improve practices, and lead the team through change. The priority is people leadership, engineering leadership, and delivery ownership rather than purely hands‑on technical expertise.

The successful candidate will be expected to help remove country‑based silos between the UK and Finland, building a stronger “One Helvar” mindset across teams.

The candidate must have:

• Proven experience line‑managing and growing software engineers – performance management, coaching, team development – and leading teams through transformation and change.
• Genuine embedded engineering credibility: you’ve done the work (e.g. C/C++, microcontrollers, RTOS), you understand its constraints, cadence, and hardware dependencies, you know what good looks like, and you have a track record of improving engineering practices (quality, testing culture, reducing cognitive load) – even if you’re not a recent hands‑on expert in every tool.
• Fluency with generative AI is mandatory. We use Claude, and we want someone who works with generative AI seamlessly and intensively as part of how they operate and can take our people and organisation to the next level of AI adoption.
• Broad understanding of end‑to‑end systems spanning hardware, embedded, IoT, and cloud, with proven experience coordinating and aligning delivery across teams working at different rhythms (embedded release management and OTA alongside cloud CI/CD) – enough to drive the alignment a next‑generation programme demands, without being the expert in any single layer.
• Able to put in place metrics genuinely relevant to embedded software – release predictability, defect escape rate, OTA success and rollback rates, cycle time within hardware constraints – and to drive decisions from facts rather than opinion (DORA‑style delivery metrics don’t map cleanly here).
• Thinks across the development and operations boundary, collaborates closely with Product Management, and is comfortable using OKRs to set direction and measure outcomes.
• High emotional intelligence and empathy, with the ability to guide teams through uncertainty and change.

• Hands‑on exposure to embedded real‑time systems, development tools, and software engineering methods.
• Embedded Linux; RTOS such as Zephyr.
• Understanding of developing code for microcontrollers such as STM
  32 and Nordic‑NRF.
• Low‑level communication protocols such as BLE, UART, I2C, and SPI.
• Reading PCB schematics and using hardware debugging tools such as J‑Link.
• Secure coding principles and cybersecurity for connected embedded devices.
• Experience in lighting/building environments – embedded systems, connected devices, lighting controls, smart buildings – and their protocols and standards (e.g. DALI‑2/D4i, DMX, wireless mesh such as Bluetooth Mesh / Zigbee / Thread, BACnet).
• AWS IoT product or platform exposure.
• Product portfolios with mixed maturity – balancing investment across established products and next‑generation…