Engineering Manager - populAI

At Hadean, we are building the next generation of defence technology. As a key player in the UK’s defence tech ecosystem, our world-leading software is trusted by defence organisations and militaries worldwide.

We specialise in AI-powered digital wargaming and Command & Control systems that help users understand complexity, make better decisions, and operate at scale. Joining Hadean means working on technology with real-world impact, alongside a team that is driven to push the limits of what’s possible.

The Team:

populAI is the simulation that makes continent-scale defence training feel like the real world. It fills a scenario with the pedestrians, traffic, shipping, aircraft, satellites and critical national infrastructure that trainees would face in reality, and it reacts to their decisions with the emergent chaos of real people and systems. Without it, an exercise is little more than a map overlay.

At its core populAI is a C++ simulation engine driving the behaviour and decision-making of huge numbers of actors. A custom distribution framework partitions that simulation across a compute cluster while keeping it coherent. A TypeScript/React front end and Node.js services put it in the hands of Simulation Operators. The team is also bringing LLM-backed capabilities into the engine: natural language control, richer actor generation and simulated social media.

The team is cross-functional, with Software, QA and DevOps Engineers, including seasoned simulation specialists. It ships into live customer exercises, demonstrators and integration hackathons to give a tight feedback loop on the work it’s delivered.

The Role:

As Engineering Manager for populAI, you will own the team's people leadership and delivery. You will create the conditions for a highly capable, multidisciplinary team to do its best work. That means setting clear expectations, developing individuals, removing blockers, and turning product priorities into reliable execution. You'll partner closely with the Product Manager and the team's technical leadership, and you'll pull in customer and business context from Field Engineering and senior stakeholders.

This role is deliberately weighted towards people, delivery and product partnership. You will lead the people and own the output, drawing on deep specialists for architecture and implementation decisions. A strong engineering foundation is still essential, though. You'll need enough technical context across the stack to earn credibility, understand performance, ask incisive questions and give candid, evidence-based feedback.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own delivery end-to-end for populAI - turning product goals into plans the team can execute and commitments stakeholders can rely on, and renegotiating early when they can't.

• Line-manage a multidisciplinary team: set expectations, give direct feedback, hold real performance and development conversations, and grow the next set of technical leaders.

• Stay hands-on. Pick up delivery work when the pressure demands it, and when you need first-hand understanding of the codebase and the process you are trying to improve.

• Own hiring for the team - define the profile, run the process, and make the case for the headcount the roadmap will need before it becomes a blocker.

• Partner with the Product Manager to understand the commercial environment, challenge assumptions, negotiate scope and timeline, and argue for the technical investment that keeps future delivery possible.

• Work with the team's technical lead and senior specialists on technical direction, making sure design and architecture decisions get made and hold up against what is coming next.

• Shape the environment your team works in rather than just operating inside it, pulling customer and business context in from Product, Field Engineering and senior stakeholders to ensure alignment and support team autonomy.

Skills, Knowledge and Experience:

• You have led and line-managed a software engineering team, and can point to what you improved for the people and for the delivery.

• You want to manage. Engineering management is your craft, not the next rung after senior engineer.

• You have partnered with Product as an equal to shape priorities and push back on scope, not simply as a backlog administrator.

• You have handled the hard parts of underperformance, conflict, ambiguity, and telling senior people things they might find uncomfortable to hear.

• You have experience working on behavioural or agent-based simulation of people, crowds or vehicles (e.g. game AI, VFX crowd simulation, industrial human behaviour simulation, or defence CGF).

• You have experience with systems languages (ideally C++) for performance-sensitive, real-time applications.

• Ability to obtain and maintain UK Security Vetted status to at least SC level.

What will help you stand out:

• You have grown a team rather than inherited one - hired into it, shaped it, and developed people into more senior roles.

• Experience delivering data-intensive, real-time, distributed or mission-critical products.

• Familiarity with defence, military modelling and simulation, or other regulated and security-conscious environments.

• Experience leading a product or team through modernisation, migration from legacy technology, or a significant change in product direction.

• A track record of building effective Engineering Manager / technical lead partnerships, or mentoring other managers.

• You want to be in the room where the product meets its users - travelling to deployments, hackathons and industry events, and turning what you see there into better decisions.

Job Benefits

• We make Hadean an awesome place to work with competitive benefits…

• Hybrid working with 1 day per week in our fantastic office in Shoreditch, London

• Private Health Insurance

• Enhanced pension scheme

• Enhanced parental leave

• 3 extra days off at Christmas (on top of our standard 25)

• L&D budget

• Regularly scheduled socials

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A Place For Everyone

We believe diversity drives innovation and for that reason we strongly encourage those from all backgrounds to apply for roles at Hadean. We are an equal opportunity employer and aim to build a workforce that is truly representative of the communities in which we operate and our clients.