Why Airbox?
You're more likely to love your work when that work has a purpose, when it's meaningful and when it's protecting lives. And, at Airbox Systems, it will. Here's why.
We are driven by passion and great people who share our enthusiasm for trying to make the world a better place. Our friendly team includes individuals with backgrounds in military, aviation, and law enforcement. Our experience brings first-hand insight into frontline operations in the air and on the ground to enable cutting-edge concepts for improving the service that we deliver.
At Airbox, our values can be described as behavioral guidance. They are the principles and beliefs that provide a cohesive vision and define who we are as a business. In doing so, they define our organisation internally and externally with our stakeholders and customers. In essence, they are our “true north” that help us to navigate our organisation through prosperous times as well as uncertain periods.
Our company beliefs and values are embodied in our culture. Whilst we celebrate the diversity of the people we work with, there are certain values and attributes all of us share – whatever your background, these are the qualities we are looking for in the people we hire: Commitment, Positive Realism, Ethics, Accountability, Humanity, Quality, and Delight.
What this role is about:
The Head of Engineering at Airbox provides a vital link between senior management and the wider Engineering team. You will have considerable experience in running and scaling engineering teams, developing leaders within those teams and setting technical standards across multiple teams. This is an amazing opportunity to set the engineering strategy, standards and roadmap to enable Airbox's ability to continue to scale at pace as it enters a new phase of growth. You will work as part of a dynamic technology leadership team covering product management, architecture, engineering, platform engineering, infrastructure and quality and will be working closely with the team alongside the CTO to drive our technology strategy and deliver the next stage of Airbox's incredible journey.
The Head of Engineering will develop and be accountable for Airbox’s Engineering Strategy, ensuring that we can deliver products at pace and that in doing so we meet high standards and recognised industry best practices across all areas of engineering. Like most businesses, we have legacy issues and technology we need to deal with so you will need to assess the current state of product and practices, and rapidly put in place plans and programs of work to modernise where necessary to ensure high quality delivery to our customers in a consistent, effective way. You will work with technical leads to set and enforce engineering standards with the ultimate goals of creating high performing engineering teams that routinely delight our customers. We are focussed on using industry recognised approaches to high performance including Google’s DORA framework, Team Topologies and Agile practices so demonstrable experience and a deep understanding of these areas is essential.
While this is not a hands-on development role, this is a combination of technical leadership and strategic oversight so a previous technical background is essential. You will be responsible for ensuring our development practices are operating effectively, and that we are sizing, planning and delivering products on time and to budget, as well as working on both customer facing and strategic development projects. You will play a project management role for some work, managing work packages, risks and issues, ensuring that we are delivering on time, and that stakeholders are fully informed. Where needed you will roll up your sleeves and get involved with teams to ensure we are delivering effectively and in doing so coach, mentor, adapt and improve what we do.
You will be viewed as a thought leader within the organisation through knowledge sharing, mentoring and driving initiatives to continuously improve how we deliver our products, ensuring our product and the underlying technologies are designed, built and tested to the high standards expected by Airbox customers. You will line and performance manage the engineering team ensuring consistency in line management across teams, and ensuring that everyone is given the opportunities to grow and develop their careers at Airbox. Culture is the make or break of engineering teams and you will set a culture around high standards, high performance and learning, building the motivated, excited team that you need to succeed.
In the words of Google DORA - we need to get better at getting better, and you will be pivotal in driving this through our software engineering teams.
Key Responsibilities:
Strategic Direction & Planning
* Working closely with the CTO and other members of the technology leadership team, you will be responsible for defining and implementing technical strategies and roadmaps in alignment with the company's objectives. You will build and own the Engineering strategy for Airbox, ensuring it meets the goals of the Airbox Business Strategy and Technology Strategy with a strong focus on engineering best practices and frameworks (e.g., Google DORA, Team Topologies, Agile delivery practices, etc).
* Understand the business and technology vision for Airbox and take a leadership role in defining and running programs of work that help us to meet our goals and objectives, guiding teams in alignment with overall business goals and industry best practices.
* Communicate effectively and transparently the engineering vision, strategy and progress to senior leadership teams at regular intervals.
* Ensure we are driven by metrics and that we use these to “get better and getting better”.
Leadership & Team Management
* Lead and manage multiple software engineering teams, fostering a culture of innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
* Take overall accountability for the quality and timescales of delivering software from engineering teams, ensuring that projects are on track and are meeting expected delivery milestones and technical standards.
* Build and maintain a strong engineering culture of innovation, and collaboration by driving the success and effectiveness of communities of practice and encourage a strong knowledge sharing culture.
* Line management of engineers either directly or through line management reports, ensuring teams have support, mentoring, career development opportunities and ensuring thorough performance management is in place.
* Recruit new team members as needed.
* Be a strong advocate for our values and be seen as a leader in demonstrating them at all times.
Driving best practices
* Responsible for maximising the performance of the Engineering team to deliver against the overall product and technology roadmap, the quality of our Engineering effort and the continuous improvement of our systems to ensure that we can scale at pace.
* Be an advocate and ambassador for best practices in software engineering, helping to drive high performance across teams.
* Work as part of cross team groups to establish and drive improved working practices and mentor teams to improve performance and efficiency.
* Be an internal thought leader through knowledge sharing, running technical sessions and raising the standard of the way we build our products.
Technical oversight
* You will ensure our engineering teams adopt languages, frameworks and best practices that align with our strategy to deliver world class products to our customers.
* Oversee the design, development, scheduling and delivery of high-quality software products and services ensuring we are working to best practices and that these are well defined and where necessary drive improvement programs to implement these.
* Establishing metrics and monitoring systems to track application performance, stability, code health and test coverage and work closely with Product Management to align improvement plans with customer issues driving improved customer satisfaction.
* Ensure that the tools being used for development management are fit for purpose and used efficiently and effectively. Act as the administrator for development tools (e.g., Jira, Confluence) and ensure these are being used consistently across teams.
Collaboration & Cross functional involvement
* Collaborating with product management, design, and other stakeholders to ensure successful product releases, working closely with Product Managers and other members of the Technology leadership team to ensure we are aligned on priorities at all times.
* Ensure compliance with regulatory standards at all times ensuring that we are addressing security concerns throughout the software development lifecycle.
* Driving the resolution of technical challenges and leading efforts to improve engineering processes.
Continuous Improvement and Innovation
* Ensuring adherence to best practices in coding, testing, and deployment, and maintaining high standards of software quality.
* Staying abreast of emerging technologies, best practices, and industry trends to incorporate into the organization's practices.
* Investigate new technical opportunities for Airbox (e.g., AI) and work with Product teams to understand where technology advances can add to the product roadmaps and drive new commercial opportunities.
At Airbox, we use a wide variety of platforms, technologies and tools to support the development of our various products. You are not expected to be hands on with these, but previous experience of working in a similar development stack would be an advantage.
* C# / Java / React / Typescript
* iOS and Android development using .NET 8 and Maui
* Kubernetes
* AWS
* REST API / Microservices
* PostgreSQL / MS SQL
* Kafka
* Prometheus / Grafana
* Azure DevOps
* GitHub
* GIS
* Jira & Confluence
About you:
* Extensive experience in managing and leading software engineering teams in fast growing, produce led businesses, ideally in a previous Head of Engineering or Engineering Director role.
* Proven track record of leading and delivering complex software projects from conception to production.
* Passionate about building high performing teams.
* Strong working knowledge of Agile methodologies, DevOps principles and practices (e.g. DORA), and the foundational engineering practices that support these, and ideally experience of implementing these within organisations.
* Deep understanding of software development best practices and the knowledge and gravitas to drive change and improvements in these areas focussing on achieving high performance.
* Experience of line and performance management, coaching and mentoring to build high performance teams.
* An effective communicator with both external and internal stakeholders and immediate teams.
* Experience delivering SaaS products within cloud platforms (e.g., AWS) and knowledge of associated technologies would be an advantage.
* Experience of developing web applications or mobile apps would be an advantage.
* NPPV3 Clearance: Successful candidates must pass an NPPV3 clearance upon successful application, which requires 3 years of UK residency.
What we offer:
We’re always looking for new ways to celebrate our people. You’ll be no different.
* The chance to work with a passionate team that’s working together every day towards our shared big ambitious goal.
* A dynamic, flexible and fun scale-up work environment with a highly talented team.
* 26 days holiday per year, plus public holidays with the opportunity to rollover 5 into the next calendar year.
* Holiday purchases scheme.
* Floating bank holidays.
* Employee Assistance Programme.
* Private medical cover with Bupa for all our colleagues.
* Enhanced Pension scheme, offering up to 6% matching contribution.
* Up to 20 Nomad Working Days per annum.
* Enhanced Parental Leave.
* Death in Service.
* Employee Referral Scheme.
* EV scheme via Octopus.
Flexible & Hybrid Working:
We said you'll get freedom to work in a way that is best for you, and that extends to being in the office – or not.
Work better from home? No worries. Prefer the office? Come on down. We have 2 mandatory Townhall days; Spring and Autumn, where the whole business gets together. When you visit the office you won’t just find rows and rows of desks. No, you’ll find our colleagues meeting on the walking pads, having planning sessions over a game of tennis table or grabbing a bean bag in our ‘Quality’ collaborative space - that’s right we live our values so much, we named our meeting spaces after them.
You can also shape work around your life at Airbox Systems; most colleagues work our core hours of 9am-5pm with others flexibly between 7am-7pm. Whether you're fitting in a spin class or the school run, you'll have the flexibility for whatever matters most. All we ask in return is that you produce great work, but when you’re working with passionate people, that part comes naturally.
Connect with us:
Interested in the role, or Airbox in general, but you don’t meet 100% of the requirements? We’d love to hear from you! We encourage you to connect with us here; we’d be excited to see if your unique skill set and experience could be a match for future roles.
A note for Recruitment Agencies:
Agencies, we appreciate you… but unsolicited CV’s will not be reviewed. We will only accept CV submissions for roles briefed to you by us. Please don’t keep pulling the attention of our Support team from our customers.
If you would be interested in working with us – please send a message to hr@airboxsystems.com, should we have anything we need additional support on we will reach out to you.
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