Software Engineering Manager

This role is for you if you get real energy from helping and managing a team of engineers to do their best work and ship full stack applied AI software. You will manage a small team of senior, highly technical software engineers, reporting to company leadership. No two days will be the same, but you can expect to:

• Lead, coach and grow a team of senior robotics software engineers
• Own delivery: turn strategy into a clear roadmap, keep the team aligned, and unblock them when things get messy
• Own communication with the hardware, customer success and operations teams, ensuring alignment in each direction
• Stay technical enough to contribute to architecture decisions, set and maintain engineering quality standards, and get into the detail when it matters, without needing to be the one writing every line of code

About the Company

Our client is building robots that can handle the messy, unpredictable and chaotic real world. They believe that by deploying today, they reveal second order effects and edge cases that cannot be seen in the lab or in simulation. Their mission is to become the UK's go to applied AI robotics team, and they will go above and beyond to get there.

What they actually do:

• Build AI models and hardware that let robots work safely alongside humans, lifting, moving and getting stuff done better and faster
• Build, ship and deploy software that runs on real robots in live customer environments, not just in the lab or in simulation
• Spend a lot of time on customer sites, to better understand and solve for the messy chaos of most environments
• Think ten or more years ahead, reimagining manual labour and creating robots that become complementary assistants for labour intensive and physically demanding tasks

They are a small, dynamic team drawn from leading AI research groups and top UK universities, founded by a team with a prior venture acquired by a major technology company.

The Role

You will own day to day leadership, delivery and alignment for the software team, and will be responsible for ensuring the team meets the strategy and goals of company leadership.

This is not a stepping stone people management role. The team you will lead is made up of senior, experienced engineers, think PhDs and former founders, working across the entire software stack from computer vision to reinforcement learning. You will need real technical credibility to contribute meaningfully to architecture conversations, but the other half of this job is leadership: internal team alignment, hiring, employee growth, and making sure the team works effectively with the hardware team and the rest of the business. If you see the people side of engineering management as critical to company performance rather than a distraction from real engineering, this role is built for you.

What You Will Do

People leadership

• Manage, coach and grow a team of senior software engineers, including PhD level specialists in ML and computer vision
• Help engineers manage their time and priorities effectively, set clear goals, and support career development for people who are highly senior in their specialism
• Handle performance conversations, feedback and any team conflicts directly and constructively
• Support hiring: define roles, run interviews, and help bring in more excellent engineers as the team grows

Delivery and alignment

• Translate the company's technical strategy into a clear, achievable roadmap for the software team
• Run planning, prioritisation and delivery tracking so the team stays focused and unblocked
• Represent the software team, communicating its needs and asks to hardware and relaying hardware's needs and asks back, so both teams stay aligned on dependencies, timelines and trade offs

Technical involvement

• Stay close enough to the codebase and architecture to ask good questions, spot risk early, and contribute to key technical decisions
• Support the team on the messy, real world integration challenges that come from deploying robots on customer sites
• Help set and maintain engineering standards: code quality, testing, documentation and ways of working

About You

• You have managed senior, experienced software engineers before, ideally including specialists with PhDs or deep research backgrounds, and you know how to lead people who often know more about their specialism than you do
• You genuinely enjoy the people side of engineering management. Communication, coaching, alignment and conflict resolution are not a tax you pay to get to the technical work, they are a core part of what motivates you
• You have a strong technical foundation, ideally with experience in robotics, computer vision, ML or high performance and embedded systems, enough to understand trade offs, ask sharp questions and hold your own in architecture discussions
• You are comfortable operating at the interface between disciplines, working closely with hardware teams, product and leadership to keep everyone aligned
• You are a clear, proactive communicator, equally able to represent the team's work upward and to translate strategy downward
• You are pragmatic and calm under pressure, comfortable with the unpredictability of robots operating in messy, real world environments
• You are low ego and collaborative, happy to be the person who unblocks others rather than the one with the loudest technical opinion in the room
• You genuinely enjoy working on software that touches real customers in live environments, not just lab or research code. You want to see your work running on the shop floor, not just in a sim

What Will Impress Us

They love proactive doers who make senior technical people better. Tell them about a team you have built or grown, a hard people situation you navigated well, or how you have helped a group of strong individual contributors work as a genuine team. If you have managed engineers with deep research or PhD backgrounds, tell them what that actually looked like day to day. Be specific, be honest about what was hard, and say why the mission excites you.

Location and Working Pattern

London office, full time, largely on site at four to five days a week. Expect vibrant startup energy with a team that knows when to laugh and when to buckle down.

Our client is an equal opportunity employer and encourages individuals from all backgrounds to apply. They offer competitive compensation, a very friendly team, a stimulating work environment and the opportunity to be part of something significant

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