We are seeking a visionary and highly experienced Senior Director of Engineering to lead our engineering organisation and play a key role within the Senior Leadership Team (SLT). You will be accountable for all aspects of engineering across the business, developing our engineering culture to support engineering excellence, operational efficiency, and strategic alignment with the company's mission and objectives. This role is critical to shaping our engineering vision, developing our people, evolving our processes, and delivering value to our customers through world-class engineering execution. You will act as an escalation route for critical issues and decisions, engaging with project teams to resolve issues and meet customer commitments. You will be accountable for resource planning and allocation to meet business commitments, and for the leadership and development of all engineering staff. Driving a high-performance and continuous improvement culture, you will identify and implement improvements to maximise the effectiveness and maturity of the engineering function. As a member of the Senior Leadership Team, you will play a key operational and strategic leadership role within the business, including contributing to strategic planning, business performance reporting, budgeting and forecasting, managing senior customer relationships, and driving cross-functional collaboration to ensure the engineering organisation remains a competitive advantage for the business. You will act as the final design authority for the business with ultimate accountability for technical decisions and engineering assurance. This pivotal executive role offers the opportunity to shape the future of a growing defence engineering business, with influence across technical, operational and strategic domains, working within a culture that values integrity, innovation, collaboration and continuous improvement. Key Responsibilities Strategic Leadership Define and lead the engineering strategy in alignment with the company’s vision, business goals, and customer requirements. Contribute to corporate strategic planning and decision-making as part of the Senior Leadership Team. Identify skills and processes required to support future growth, and develop strategic plans to implement these capabilities. Champion innovation, R&D, and technology roadmaps aligned with future capability needs in defence and security markets. People Leadership Inspire, lead, and develop a team of ~170 engineers, building a high-performance, inclusive, and collaborative engineering culture. Define and implement effective organisational structures, talent strategies, and career development pathways. Lead workforce planning, succession planning, and skills development in line with emerging technologies and capability demands, ensuring knowledge transfer and resilience within key technical capabilities. Operational Excellence Own and optimise engineering processes, tools, methodologies, and standards across the full systems engineering lifecycle. Ensure timely, cost-effective, and high-quality delivery of engineering outputs across all programmes and bids. Create a culture of ownership and accountability at all levels, ensuring that teams and individuals are empowered to make decisions, ask the right questions, challenge assumptions and work in the best interests of the programmes at all times. Governance and Compliance Establish robust governance, quality assurance, and continuous improvement across engineering delivery, with a strong focus on design assurance for safety-critical systems. Ensure engineering compliance with customer requirements, industry standards, export control regulations, security requirements, and safety legislation. Oversee technical risk management and mitigation strategies across all engineering activities. Represent engineering in audit processes and customer/government reviews. Customer and Stakeholder Engagement Act as the senior engineering representative to customers, partners, suppliers, and regulatory bodies. Lead technical engagement on key customer programmes, ensuring alignment to customer needs and expectations. Act as an escalation route for issues and decisions, leading problem-solving activities to resolve issues and meet customer commitments. Support business development and bid teams with technical strategy, estimation, and solution development. Technology and Innovation Drive adoption of modern engineering practices and tools that improve efficiency. Monitor emerging technologies and assess their application within the defence domain. Promote a culture of innovation and lead the development of new IP, patents, and product capabilities. Qualification And Experience Proven track record as a senior engineering leader in the defence or high-integrity systems sector. Extensive experience managing multidisciplinary engineering teams and complex systems programmes with a product development focus. Deep understanding of systems engineering, product development lifecycles, and defence standards. Strong business acumen with the ability to link technical strategies to commercial outcomes. Exceptional people leadership skills with experience growing and mentoring large engineering teams. Ability to build strong relationships and communicate effectively with both internal and external stakeholders, at executive, customer, and government levels. Key skills will include influencing and negotiating, conflict resolution, priority setting, problem solving and the ability to build proficient and effective teams. Display high energy and personal impact; be prepared to adopt a ‘sleeves rolled up’ leadership approach. Ability to solve complex problems at pace and make effective decisions under pressure. Excellent organisational, interpersonal and presentation skills. Understanding of international regulatory defence environment (especially US/UK interaction) is desirable Understanding of Waterfall, Agile and Hybrid project delivery methodologies is desirable. Regular UK and occasional overseas travel will be required. Please note: Successful candidate we be required to obtain relevant security clearance requited for the role with no restrictions.