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.

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.