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.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.
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.
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.
