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.

Security

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

Equal Opportunity Employer

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.

Privacy Notice

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.