Engineering Manager

Join TrustFlight, an AI-first organization revolutionizing aviation safety. As an Engineering Manager, you'll lead a high-performing team of engineers, focusing on people and systems leadership rather than technical leadership. You'll be responsible for raising performance standards, managing team performance, and ensuring quality across the team. This role offers the opportunity to shape engineering practices across the organization and engage with AI tools to drive efficiency and innovation.

Missions

• Coaching and developing a high-performing team of engineers, setting explicit expectations, and managing performance fairly and decisively.
• Acting as the chief unblocker for the team across tooling, infrastructure, testing, and process, and owning the team's infrastructure-as-code estate.
• Leading the team's adoption of AI-assisted development, setting the standards for where and how AI is used, and ensuring AI-generated code is understood and accountable.

Profil recherché

- A track record of raising and holding a quality bar across a team: testing strategy, review standards, and the discipline to keep them consistent as the team and the codebase change

- Direct experience of performance management, including at least one case of successfully improving, or fairly exiting, an underperformer

- At least three years' experience as a dedicated people manager of software engineers, including senior engineers and, ideally, technical leads

- Current, practical familiarity with infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD and automated testing, covering Terraform, Pulumi or equivalent, containerised deployment and a major cloud platform, sufficient to own the estate, set standards and review the work

- A software engineering background sufficient to contribute credibly in a design review, challenge an architectural decision on its merits, and distinguish a team that feels fast from one that is fast. The postholder will not act as the team's technical lead and will not be assessed on code they write

- Technical Judgement - Sufficient depth to ask the right question, weigh a trade-off, and defer to the technical leads when appropriate

- People Leadership - Raises the bar with every hire and promotion; coaches deliberately and develops leaders as well as engineers; creates the conditions for people to do their best work

- Systems Thinking - Treats delivery problems as problems with the system rather than with the people; identifies the constraint before asking for more effort; takes obstacles off other people's desks and measures success by the team's output

- High Standards in a Safety Domain - Holds a consistent quality bar and does not allow defects to pass down the line; recognises that operators' safety cases depend on this software

- Fairness and Consistency - Applies the same bar and the same care to everyone; makes reasoning visible; is trusted by engineers and by peers in calibration

- Practical experience of agentic development setups, using tools such as Claude Code, Codex or Cursor, introduced at team or organisation level along with the governance around them

- Experience building or operating auditable agent orchestration systems. A strong advantage, though not a requirement

- A track record of putting AI workflows into real use, and of helping ship AI features in production applications

- An understanding that this field is changing quickly, with the adaptability to keep pace and the credibility to bring a team along on that journey

- Experience leading, or contributing materially to, a technology-stack consolidation across multiple teams

- Experience raising standards across a heterogeneous or inherited technology estate without mandating uniformity

- Experience in a regulated, safety-critical or externally audited software environment, such as aviation, medical, defence or financial services. Valuable, though not a requirement