TrustFlight
Engineering Manager
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Role Overview
TrustFlight builds software that aviation operators around the world rely on to keep flying safe, for an international customer base with an unusually varied set of problems. This role exists to build and sustain a high-performing team of six to eight engineers: coaching each individual, holding a consistent standard of performance, and owning the process, testing, tooling and infrastructure the team depends on. It is a people and systems leadership role rather than a technical leadership one. Product and the technical leads decide what gets built and how; the Engineering Manager owns the conditions that allow them to build it well and quickly. The postholder is one of four Engineering Managers in a Product, Design and Engineering department of around 40 to 50 people, which is growing and maturing quickly. There is considerable scope here to shape how engineering works across it.
Key Responsibilities
- Raise the performance bar with every hire and every promotion. Treat coaching as a core duty of the role, and upskilling as a standing remit: develop engineers through regular 1:1s, direct feedback, stretch assignments and explicit development plans, and grow technical leads as well as individual contributors.
- Manage performance fairly and decisively. Set explicit expectations, recognise strong work, raise problems early and allow runway to respond, and address sustained underperformance promptly.
- Act as the chief unblocker for the team across tooling, infrastructure, testing and process, and own the team's infrastructure-as-code estate. Identify the genuine constraints on throughput, including code review latency, slow or flaky tests, handoffs, approval gates and unreliable environments. Remove them, ensure the team can build, test, deploy, observe and recover quickly and safely, and evidence the improvement in flow metrics.
- Own testing standards and the consistency of quality across the team, including the definition of “tested”, the criteria that gate a release, and the management of coverage and test flakiness. Quality should not vary according to who wrote the code.
- Architect cross-team developer tooling and drive consolidation of the technology estate, jointly with peer Engineering Managers and the Director of Engineering. Build the case for moving from a varied stack onto fewer, better-supported technologies. Establish paved roads and automated guardrails that teams adopt on merit, and sequence the change so that it strengthens delivery.
- Work with the technical leads to maintain an accurate and current picture of technical debt, quality and process constraints. Translate it into risks and opportunities the Product Manager can prioritise, so that the balance between product output and technical excellence is a deliberate decision.
- Lead the team's adoption of AI-assisted development. Set the standards for where and how AI is used, ensure AI-generated code is understood and accountable to a named engineer, guard against data, licensing and security risk, and maintain an evidence-based view of its effect on the team.
- Help establish consistent engineering practice across TrustFlight with the other Engineering Managers. No shared approach to levelling, calibration, feedback and hiring yet exists, and building one is part of this role, so that an engineer's experience does not depend on which manager they report to.
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Required Qualifications & Experience
- At least three years' experience as a dedicated people manager of software engineers, including senior engineers and, ideally, technical leads.
- 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.
- 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 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.
- Demonstrable experience of improving how a team works, supported by evidence of the resulting difference.
- Direct experience of performance management, including at least one case of successfully improving, or fairly exiting, an underperformer.
Desirable Skills & Experience
- 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.
AI & Digital Competency
TrustFlight is an AI-first organisation. Every role is expected to actively engage with AI tools and digital ways of working to drive efficiency, quality, and innovation.
Tier 3 — AI Builder
Develops and integrates AI-powered solutions
Builds, fine-tunes, or integrates AI/ML models and pipelines. Establishes evaluation frameworks for AI systems. Ensures responsible AI practices (fairness, transparency, data governance). Contributes to TrustFlight’s AI strategy.
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Role-Specific AI & Digital Skills
- Set and maintain the team's standards for AI-assisted development, covering which tools are approved, where they may and may not be used, and how their output is reviewed.
- Ensure AI-generated code entering the codebase is understood and accountable to a named engineer, and that review capacity scales with the volume AI produces.
- Apply AI to strengthen testing and documentation, ensuring that AI-written tests validate the requirement and do not simply confirm the behaviour of the implementation.
- Establish guardrails against the specific risks of AI-assisted engineering: leakage of customer or regulated data into model context, licensing contamination, and plausible but incorrect code in safety-relevant paths.
AI Development & Growth
- Complete TrustFlight's AI fluency onboarding within the first 30 days.
- Dedicate time each month to evaluating emerging AI development tooling and agentic workflows, and pilot promising tools in a controlled way.
- Share findings with the Engineering Manager group and the wider engineering team, including negative results.
- Contribute to TrustFlight's engineering-wide standards for AI-assisted development, and to the evidence base available to customers and auditors.
Competencies & Behaviours
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Technical Judgement: Sufficient depth to ask the right question, weigh a trade-off, and defer to the technical leads when appropriate.
- 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.
Working Arrangements
Working Hours
40 hours per week
Work Pattern
Hybrid. London-based, with a minimum of two days per week in the London office and the remainder flexible.
Travel Requirements
Occasional travel to other TrustFlight locations and to team or company events. Not a regular requirement of the role.
On-Call / Shift Work
Not part of the on-call rota. Accountable for the team’s on-call practice being sustainable and fairly shared.
Special Conditions
Right to work in the UK. Background screening as required for access to customer and regulated data, including ability to obtain CTC.
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