Director of Engineering & Platform

CHAMP Cargosystems S.A.; United Kingdom; On-site; GBP 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

CHAMP Cargosystems S.A. is seeking a Director of Engineering & Platform to lead the Cargo BU's technology, platform and engineering organization. The role focuses on AI-led engineering and a cloud-hosted Neo SaaS platform across a hybrid estate, balancing cost, reliability and performance.

You will set engineering strategy, own cloud hosting, CI/CD and platform SLAs, and guide a team of engineers and external partners to deliver high-quality cargo management solutions for a global customer base.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of software engineering experience across full lifecycle
• 8+ years in engineering leadership at director or equivalent level
• Experience owning a cloud-hosted SaaS platform end-to-end (hosting strategy and cost)
• Experience governing large external/offshore development partners
• Excellent analytical, problem-solving and interpersonal skills; good command of English

Responsibilities

• Set multi-year engineering and technology strategy aligned to the product roadmap
• Own architecture, patterns, frameworks and engineering standards across domains
• Make key technology and make-vs-buy decisions for platform capabilities
• Provide visible technical leadership and align engineering with BU strategy
• Drive continuous improvement in delivery quality, efficiency and cost
• Lead the Cargo BU engineering organisation (~100 headcount) across CHAMP geographies

Skills

Technology leadership

Strategic thinking

Problem solving

Communication

Agile methodologies

Education

Bachelor’s degree in IT/CS or related field

Advanced degree a plus

Tools

Java

Spring Boot

Angular

Ionic

AWS

Ansible

Maven

GitLab

Bamboo

Kafka

NGINX

ELK

Job description

Reporting toVP Cargo Management Portfolio

Location: United Kingdom (Preferred)

While the United Kingdom is the preferred location for this role, we embrace a flexible approach and welcome applications from talented professionals based in Luxembourg, Spain, Czech Republic, subject to local employment requirements.

We are building the next generation of cargo management applications as a modern, cloud-hosted SaaS platform (Neo), and we are looking for an exceptional engineering leader to own the technology, platform and engineering organization behind it.

We are currently looking for a Director of Engineering & Platform to join the Cargo Business Unit leadership team.

Mission:

Own the technology, platform and engineering capability of the Cargo BU. As one of the BU’s top-layer leaders, the Director sets engineering strategy and standards, owns the cloud-hosted Neo platform end-to-end — including its hosting strategy, reliability and cost — governs internal and partner engineering teams to a single quality bar, and makes the BU an AI-led engineering organisation that both builds with AI and embeds AI into the products our customers use.

Responsibilities and Accountabilities:

• Set the multi-year engineering and technology strategy for the Cargo BU, aligned to the product roadmap and the BU’s growth ambition.
• Own the technical architecture, patterns, frameworks and engineering standards applied consistently across all product domains and teams.
• Make and own key technology and make-vs-buy decisions for shared and platform capabilities; balance investment in resilience, performance and cost against delivery pressure, and make the trade-offs visible to BU leadership and EXCO.
• Provide visible technical leadership and credibility — set direction the strongest engineers respect, and represent engineering in BU strategy, planning and customer conversations.
• Drive continuous improvement in delivery quality, efficiency and cost through process, tooling and architectural change.

Platform, Cloud & Hosting Strategy

• Own the architecture, scalability, security and operational health of the Neo SaaS platform and its shared services.
• Own the cloud hosting strategy across our hybrid estate (private datacentres + AWS): hosting model, regions, multi-tenancy, resilience, disaster recovery and security posture.
• Own cloud cost and a FinOps culture — instil cost awareness and accountability across teams; drive right-sizing, reserved/committed-use commitments, idle-resource elimination, and cost-per-customer/per-tenant visibility so growth scales economically.
• Own CI/CD, environments, release tooling and the DevOps practice; drive deployment frequency, lead time and reliability; define and track platform SLAs/SLOs and own production incident management for shared services.
• Own a single, visible technical-debt backlog and ensure it is funded and burned down rather than ignored.

AI – Led Engineering & AI in our Products

Making CHAMP an AI-led engineering organisation is a top priority for this role.

• Build an AI-first engineering culture: drive adoption of AI coding assistants, AI-assisted code review, automated test generation and intelligent monitoring to raise developer productivity and quality.
• Set the policies and guardrails for responsible AI use in engineering — security, data leakage, IP protection, access controls and approval workflows.
• Partner with Product to embed AI capabilities into the Neo product portfolio (e.g. intelligent automation, decision support, anomaly detection and AI-driven insights for air-cargo customers), and own the platform foundations (data, MLOps/AI tooling, inference hosting and cost) that make this possible.
• Keep the organisation current as AI engineering practices evolve and build the team’s AI capability through hiring and upskilling.

Engineering Delivery & Standards

• Ensure development scope is planned, implemented and delivered as committed, to agreed plans with product and project management, with functional and technical quality.
• Ensure the right level of skills and capacity is developed to meet development demands on time and to standard across programs such as Cargospot/UXR.
• Work with architecture and development teams to ensure performant, robust software; ensure teams both implement and contribute to the architectural strategy and product roadmap.
• Liaise with Product Managers, Architects and technical leads to ensure requirements are properly specified, aligned with architecture and product strategy, and appropriately estimated and planned into releases.
• Proactively identify and manage risks, issues, blocking points and changes; facilitate impact assessment and prioritisation with stakeholders.
• Ensure teams support testing and product support within agreed priorities and SLAs, with quality and customer focus.

Team Management

• Lead the Cargo BU engineering organisation (~100 headcount) across CHAMP geographies — primarily London, Luxembourg and Philippines — including a team of Engineering Managers and the governance of external/partner developers.
• Provide leadership and direction, growing and nurturing a high-performing, collaborative, innovative and customer-focused software engineering culture.
• Lead and motivate multi-disciplinary, geographically distributed and multi-cultural teams.
• Own the developer career framework, levelling and hiring bar; supervise organisational development, recruiting and career development in conjunction with HR.
• Define and support the staff retention plan aligned with CHAMP objectives.

Working with Other Departments

• Work closely with Product Managers to ensure software development progresses towards the CHAMP product roadmap.
• Work closely with Architects to ensure development adheres to technical standards and the enterprise architecture strategy.
• Work closely with IT to ensure technology tooling enables efficient development and that products are deployed in line with CHAMP’s technology implementation strategy.
• Facilitate, enable and enforce a constructive, collaborative cross-department environment to encourage innovation and achieve organisational targets.
• Establish and maintain relationships with external suppliers as appropriate — e.g. recruitment agencies, training providers, software product vendors, IT consultants and service providers.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities

• Proven experience leading engineering and delivering application/SaaS products on time and to quality for a large, international customer base.
• Strong technology leadership presence with a positive, proactive leadership style and the technical depth to set architecture direction.
• Ability to systematically break complex, ambiguous problems into manageable pieces, deep dive into detail, then step back to the big picture and customer value.
• Disciplined and process-driven, with non-negotiable standards of performance and quality.
• In-depth experience of Agile, Scrum and Lean software engineering best practices.

Technology environment (fluency expected; hands-on depth in several):

• Backend services in Java, Spring Boot, Web Services with Oracle / SQL Server / MongoDB; integration with core Java cargo applications via REST APIs.
• Frontends in Angular and the Ionic framework for mobile apps.
• Deployment to Linux servers, private datacentres and AWS using Ansible & Maven; CI/CD with GitLab / Bamboo.
• Cloud architecture and operations on AWS (or equivalent), with strong DevOps, CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code practice; FinOps / cloud cost management.
• Familiarity with Kafka, NGINX, load balancing and ELK; and with modern AI/ML engineering tooling and AI-assisted development.

Education and Experience

• Bachelor’s degree (or equivalent) in Information Technology, Computer Science, Computer Engineering or related field; advanced degree a plus.
• 12+ years of relevant software engineering experience across the full lifecycle, from requirements through product support.
• 8+ years in engineering leadership, including line and program/project management at director or equivalent level, in a large, at-scale, global, multi-cultural environment.
• Demonstrable experience owning a cloud-hosted SaaS platform end-to‑end, including hosting strategy and cost ownership.
• Experience leading AI adoption in engineering and/or embedding AI into products is strongly preferred.
• Experience governing large external/offshore development partners against quality and delivery outcomes.
• Excellent analytical, problem-solving and interpersonal skills; good command of English is a must.

The selected candidate may be subject to the provision of an up-to-date (not older than 3 months) criminal record certificate.

Our culture and values

We believe happy employees create thriving work environments. With over 500 team members from 32 countries, speaking over 30 languages, CHAMP is a uniquely diverse and welcoming place to work. Our globally minded staff collaborates with clients and vendors worldwide from our offices in London, Zürich, Manila, Atlanta, Singapore, and our Headquarters in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

Security: the successful candidate will have to comply with CHAMP Security Requirements (including but not limited to CHAMP’s IT Security Policies, especially the ISMS Policy and the Acceptable Use Policy, mandatory courses, confidentiality and data protection, use of company assets, and incident reporting).

CHAMP Cargosystems is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any kind. We are committed to the principle of equal employment opportunity for all employees and to providing employees with a work environment free of discrimination and harassment. All employment decisions are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to race, ethnic background, religion or belief, family or parental status, or any other status protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate.

Please note that any personal data that you submit along with your application will be processed by CHAMP and may be processed by any of its global entities as necessary. These data will be treated in strict compliance with the applicable data protection legislation (i.e. the Law of 2 August 2002 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data, as amended, and Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016, - the GDPR -, which entered into force on 25 May 2018, as well as any other subsequent regulation).Please follow the link to the CHAMP Candidates Privacy Notice for further information.