Engineering Tools Manager

Mission

Thales Belgium, Herstal site, is a world leader in precision-guided rocket systems for helicopters and jet aircraft. To support its ambitious production and product development roadmap, Thales is strengthening its Engineering organization with an ENGINEERING Tools Manager to accelerate digital transformation and support product development based on Model-Based Design, V-cycle and iterative development methodologies.

As Engineering Tools Manager, you will be responsible for the functional management of the Engineering tool landscape, contributing to improving the quality, maturity and efficiency of Engineering processes and deliverables.

You will act as the interface between Engineering, IS/IT and Thales Engineering organizations, ensuring that tools effectively support Engineering teams throughout the product lifecycle.

Responsibilities

• Understand Engineering needs: develop a strong understanding of Engineering activities, to transform into tools and ways of working; identify, analyze and prioritize tool and digitalization requirements.
• Own the functional Engineering tool landscape: define the tool roadmap, evaluate solutions, manage the lifecycle of tools and identify opportunities for improvement, standardization and rationalization.
• Configure and deploy tools: translate Engineering requirements into functional configurations and ensure that tools effectively support user needs and existing Engineering practices.
• Support the product development lifecycle: ensure that Engineering tools effectively support activities across requirements, architecture, design, development, integration, verification and validation.
• Support Engineering software tools: contribute to the identification, deployment and improvement of tools used by Embedded Software teams, including solutions supporting software development, automated testing and CI/CD practices.
• Support different development approaches: understand Model-Based Design, V-cycle, Agile and iterative development methodologies and ensure that the Engineering tool landscape is aligned with the corresponding ways of working.
• Drive adoption and user enablement: act as the Engineering Tools focal point, provide user support, develop documentation and deliver training.
• Collaborate with IS/IT: work closely with IS/IT, which provides and manages infrastructure, platforms and core IT services, while ENGINEERING Tools owns the functional configuration, deployment, usage and user enablement of Engineering tools.
• Collaborate across Thales: work with Engineering teams from other sites and Group organizations to share best practices, promote standards and leverage common solutions.
• Drive continuous improvement: identify opportunities to improve tool usability, integration, automation and Engineering productivity through the effective use of digital tools.

Profile

• Master's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, IT or a related technical field.
• Experience in an R&D or industrial Engineering environment, ideally with experience managing, deploying or supporting Engineering tools and applications.
• Strong understanding of Engineering activities and product development processes, with a genuine interest in understanding how products are designed, developed, integrated and validated.
• Good understanding of the product lifecycle and development methodologies, including Model-Based Design, V-cycle, Agile and iterative approaches.
• Ability to understand Engineering processes and translate user and business needs into effective functional tool configurations and solutions.
• Strong interest in digital tools and their practical application to improve Engineering efficiency, quality and maturity.
• Good project management, analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work transversally and influence stakeholders without direct authority.
• Proactive, autonomous and user-oriented, with a strong interest in continuous improvement and digital transformation.
• Comfortable working in an international, multi-site environment and collaborating with teams across different organizations and cultures.
• Knowledge of following tools are an advantage: Polarion, Jira, Git, Jenkins, Blackduck, SonarQube, PowerBI, …
• Fluent in English and French; Dutch and German are a plus.