Deputy Head of Engineering and Delivery

Thales is a global technology leader trusted by governments, institutions, and enterprises to tackle their most demanding challenges. From quantum applications and artificial intelligence to cybersecurity and 6G innovation, our solutions empower critical decisions rooted in human intelligence. Operating at the forefront of aerospace and space, cybersecurity and digital identity, we’re driven by a mission to build a future we can all trust.

In Singapore, Thales has been a trusted partner since 1973, originally focused on aerospace activities in the Asia-Pacific region. With 2,000 employees across three local sites, we deliver cutting-edge solutions across aerospace (including air traffic management), defence and security, and digital identity and cybersecurity sectors. Together, we’re shaping the future by enabling customers to make pivotal decisions that safeguard communities and power progress.

Whom We Are Looking For

As the deputy Head of Engineering and Delivery, you own the execution and people side of technology delivery. You ensure teams have the right skills, structures, and processes to deliver high-quality products reliably and at scale. You report to the Head of Engineering and Delivery but also to the directors of the lab.

We are looking for a seasoned engineering leader who thrives at the intersection of rigorous delivery and creative ambiguity. You've led multi-disciplinary teams through the full arc of product development — from early-stage experimentation to production-grade systems — and you know how to maintain momentum without sacrificing quality.

You bring enough technical depth to earn the respect of engineers and architects, but your real strength is building the conditions in which great work happens: clear ownership, healthy engineering culture, and a delivery rhythm that doesn't crush innovation. You're comfortable operating in a fast-moving environment where requirements evolve, priorities shift, and not every bet pays off — and you help your teams navigate that with clarity rather than chaos.

You've likely worked across both established organizations and leaner, more entrepreneurial settings, and you understand the distinct challenges of each. Above all, you're someone who believes that engineering excellence and speed of learning are not in tension — they reinforce each other.

Responsibilities:

• Responsible for on-time, quality delivery of product increments.
• Promote the use of agentic AI in everyday engineering practices to improve the prototyping phases but improving the overall quality of the system.
• Ensure Agile/Scaled-Agile processes (Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, etc.) are applied effectively, adapting them to new AI-driven development when needed.
• Track delivery KPIs (velocity, cycle time, defect rates, deployment frequency).
• Build and manage the engineering organization (hiring, onboarding, career paths, performance management).
• Define team structures (feature teams, platform teams, enabling teams, etc.).
• Foster a culture of continuous improvement, collaboration and accountability.
• Ensure that engineering practices (CI/CD, testing, observability, DevOps) are consistently applied.
• Support but do not override the Chief Architect in architecture decisions but act as a pragmatic enabler of the architecture vision.
• Ensure technical debt is managed as part of delivery planning.
• Own engineering budget, resource planning, and vendor/outsourcing decisions.
• Manage delivery risks (resourcing gaps, process bottlenecks, quality regressions).
• Ensure compliance with relevant standards (e.g., safety-critical, security, data privacy).

Requirements:

Education

• Bachelors in Computer Science or Information Technology
• Masters degree in Computer Science or Data Science, if applicable

Essential Skills/Experience

• Proven track record leading engineering and delivery across multiple concurrent workstreams, from concept through production
• Experience managing and developing multi-disciplinary teams — engineers, architects, QA, and delivery professionals — in a hands-on leadership capacity
• Strong grasp of modern software delivery practices: CI/CD, agile at scale, platform thinking, and how to adapt these in fast-moving, ambiguous environments
• Ability to hold both the strategic and operational view — setting direction while staying close enough to the ground to spot delivery risk early
• Demonstrated ability to work effectively with senior stakeholders, translating between engineering realities and business or programme-level expectations
• Experience building or evolving engineering culture: hiring, ways of working, standards, and psychological safety
• Comfortable with ambiguity and iterative discovery — you've delivered in contexts where the problem itself was still being defined
• Financial and resource accountability: budgets, headcount planning, and making the case for investment

Desirable Skills/Experience

• Familiarity with cloud-native architectures and platforms (e.g. Kubernetes, serverless, event-driven systems) — enough to have informed conversations with architects and make sound build-vs-buy calls
• Experience in a dedicated innovation, R&D, or venture-style environment — labs, incubators, or internal startups
• Exposure to hardware/software integration or cyber-physical systems, where software delivery intersects with physical or operational constraints
• Background in regulated or safety-conscious industries — understanding what "good enough to ship" looks like when the stakes are higher
• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development practices: using LLMs as a force-multiplier in the development lifecycle — code generation, documentation, test coverage, and architectural exploration — and the judgment to know where these tools accelerate and where they introduce risk
• Awareness of the emerging "vibe coding" paradigm and what it means for team composition, code ownership, and quality assurance — including how to govern it without killing the productivity gains
• Experience scaling or winding down initiatives: knowing when to accelerate, when to pivot, and when to kill something cleanly is as valuable as knowing how to build

Essential Traits

• Calm under ambiguity: you don't need a perfect picture to make a decision, and you don't transmit anxiety downward when things are uncertain
• Intellectually honest: you call things as they are, with stakeholders and with your team; you don't over-promise to buy time or comfort
• Builder's instinct: you are energized by creating things that don't exist yet, not just optimizing what does
• High trust, high standards: you give people genuine autonomy and hold them to genuine accountability; you're neither a micromanager nor a passenger
• Bridge-builder: you naturally translate across boundaries: technical/non-technical, strategic/operational, internal/external
• Resilient and pragmatic: you absorb setbacks without drama and recalibrate quickly; you know the difference between a problem and a crisis