Weapon System Product Lead

What you'll do

• Own the product direction and lifecycle coherence of one of our weapon systems currently in development, ensuring it evolves into a capable, reliable, producible, maintainable, and supportable product.
• Build and maintain the product roadmap, translating operational needs, technical maturity, test evidence, and business priorities into clear capability spirals, releases, and product decisions.
• Act as the product authority across engineering, manufacturing, test & safety, quality, programmes, and ILS, ensuring a shared understanding of the product, its intended use, and its next priorities.
• Own the product baseline, variants, versioning, and configuration intent, ensuring that engineering changes are assessed before adoption.
• Set clear product priorities and trade-offs with engineering, balancing capability, safety, reliability, cost, schedule, maturity, production, and through-life sustainability.
• Engage with relevant customer and operator stakeholders to validate priorities and usage requirements.
• Use evidence from integration, test, production, maintenance, and operator feedback to shape the next development spirals and focus investment on the changes that create the greatest product and operational value.
• Ensure reliability, maintainability, producibility, supportability, transportability, and safety from the outset. Work closely with the ILS organisation, retaining ownership of the resulting product trade-offs and evolution.
• Establish lean product-management structures and decision routines where needed, keeping the product moving without adding process for its own sake.
• Make sound decisions under real technical and delivery ambiguity, recognise when a decision requires wider expertise or escalation, and step into unowned product problems rather than waiting for assignment.

Who you are

• You have five or more years’ experience leading the development and evolution of complex hardware products or systems, ideally in defence, aerospace, or a similarly demanding environment.
• An understanding of the full product lifecycle, from requirements and design through integration, test, production, in-service support, and product improvement.
• A technically credible with engineering teams and can turn complex technical detail into clear product priorities, decisions, and trade-offs.
• Experience managing product baselines, variants, configuration, and the impact of engineering changes in a controlled development environment.
• You understand how safety, reliability, maintainability, producibility, supportability, and cost shape a successful product, not just its technical performance.
• Experience leading effectively across disciplines, creating alignment without needing formal authority over every contributor.
• Comfortable taking ownership in ambiguity, making considered decisions with incomplete information, and escalating issues where the decision or risk exceeds your authority.
• You bring a pragmatic, hands-on approach, building only the structure needed to keep the product moving, and continuously improving ways of working rather than working problems.
• British citizenship is required due to the security requirements of the role. You must be eligible to obtain and maintain the required UK security clearance.

What we offer

• A mission-driven environment with the opportunity to work on one of Europe’s most consequential defence challenges, with direct impact on sovereign capability and security.

• Daily collaboration with leading experts across engineering, operations, business development, and defence, with genuine opportunities to learn, contribute, and grow.

• Exposure to the full lifecycle of complex defence programmes, from customer requirements and commercial strategy through to engineering delivery and flight testing.

• High ownership and autonomy: no time tracking and no micromanagement, just clear objectives and accountability for outcomes.

• A fast-paced environment where good ideas are implemented quickly and feedback from testing and flight drives real decisions.

• A culture that values clarity, integrity, and excellence, and supports people who take initiative and push boundaries responsibly.

• Competitive compensation and real share options aligned with responsibility and impact, not tenure or hierarchy.