Quality Director, Underwater Systems

Thales; Cheadle; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Private medical insurance

Buying or selling annual leave

Cycle to work schemes

Employee discounts

Paid volunteering day

Stocks and shares

Annual bonus

Job summary

Thales is seeking a Head of Quality to lead Quality Assurance across its Underwater Systems (UWS) business in the UK. This senior role drives quality excellence across bids, projects, design, qualification and manufacturing lifecycles, ensuring governance and customer requirements are met while leading teams across multiple sites.

The role includes owning the quality function budget, maintaining the QMS, and delivering continuous improvement and customer satisfaction.

Qualifications

• Proven experience in a senior Quality Management leadership role.
• Experience leading, developing, and coaching professional teams and people leaders.
• Background in a fast-paced engineering, design, development, or manufacturing environment.
• Experience managing budgets, forecasting, and reporting.
• Strong leadership, communication, stakeholder management, and problem-solving skills.
• Demonstrated ability to drive quality improvement and embed a culture of continuous improvement.

Responsibilities

• Lead the functional team across three key sites to deliver all aspects of Quality Assurance within bids, projects, design and development lifecycles, system validation, supply chain, manufacturing, and customer acceptance across all domain programmes.
• Lead the team to ensure consistent application of governance that upholds quality standards across all process gates, milestones, and lifecycle events.
• Implement and ensure the application of the Quality Policy and adherence to, and governance of, the organisation's QMS.
• Represent Quality Assurance within senior leadership reviews, presenting material as appropriate to meet the needs of the business and functional strategy.
• Ensure functional attendance at formal project reviews and the provision of independent Quality reporting to senior programme stakeholders.
• Ensure customer requirements are understood, embedded, and delivered, with customer needs and perspectives considered throughout delivery.
• Ensure effective escalation of quality issues and use of alerting and veto processes for major quality system breakdowns, ensuring actions are taken at the appropriate leadership levels.
• Drive Quality Assurance forward within the domain by delivering a strategy and roadmap to achieve continuous improvement.

Skills

Strategic Leadership

Team Leadership

Stakeholder Management

Decision Making

Quality Assurance

Integrity

Job description

Thales is seeking a Head of Quality to lead Quality Assurance across its Underwater Systems (UWS) business in the UK. This senior role drives quality excellence across bids, projects, design, qualification and manufacturing lifecycles, ensuring governance and customer requirements are met while leading teams across multiple sites.

The role includes owning the quality function budget, maintaining the QMS, and delivering continuous improvement and customer satisfaction.