Engineering Manager - dominAI

At Hadean, we are building the next generation of defence technology. As a key player in the UK’s defence tech ecosystem, our world-leading software is trusted by defence organisations and militaries worldwide.

We specialise in AI-powered digital wargaming and Command & Control systems that help users understand complexity, make better decisions, and operate at scale. Joining Hadean means working on technology with real-world impact, alongside a team that is driven to push the limits of what’s possible.

The Team

dominAI is a close-knit team of highly technical, deeply collaborative engineers, each bringing genuine specialism to a shared mission. We move fast, hold each other to a high standard, and take real pride in what we ship. We work in sprints, building MVPs that are regularly taken to industry events, integration hackathons, and live demonstrations. The feedback loop between building and showing is tight, and it shapes what we build next.

This is a new product for Hadean. We are building it quickly and building it right - and the people who join now will shape its direction. The team combines AI, simulation, infrastructure, and web engineering expertise, with significant autonomy and a strong culture of continuous learning, honest retrospectives, and engineering craft.

The Role:

As Engineering Manager for our dominAI team, you will own the team's people leadership and delivery. You will create the conditions in which a highly capable, multidisciplinary engineering team can do its best work: setting clear expectations, developing individuals, removing blockers, and turning product priorities into reliable execution. You will work closely with the Product Manager and partner with the team's technical leadership, creating a complementary pairing in which you lead the people and the output while drawing on deep technical specialists for architecture and implementation decisions. In particular you will bring experience of working with AI/ML specialists and the unique challenges of integrating this more research-oriented work into an agile software delivery process.

You will not be the strongest engineer in the team and you don't need to be but you will be in the codebase. We will onboard you by giving you real work to ship, because we don't think you can improve a team's process, judge its output, or empathise with its frustrations without first hand experience.

The team is growing and will split to own distinct feature sets within the overall dominAI product. You will take one of those two sub-teams and build it out — shaping who is in it and how it works.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own delivery end-to-end for dominAI — turning product goals into plans the team can execute and commitments stakeholders can rely on, and renegotiating early when they can't.

• Line-manage a multidisciplinary team: set expectations, give direct feedback, hold real performance and development conversations, and grow the next set of technical leaders.

• Stay hands-on. Pick up delivery work when the pressure demands it, and when you need first-hand understanding of the codebase and the process you are trying to improve.

• Own hiring for the team — define the profile, run the process, and make the case for the headcount the roadmap will need before it becomes a blocker.

• Partner with the Product Manager to understand the commercial environment, challenge assumptions, negotiate scope and timeline, and argue for the technical investment that keeps future delivery possible.

• Work with the team's technical lead and senior specialists on technical direction, making sure design and architecture decisions get made and hold up against what is coming next.

• Shape the environment your team works in rather than just operating inside it, pulling customer and business context in from Product, Field Engineering and senior stakeholders to ensure alignment and support team autonomy.

Skills, Knowledge and Experience

• You have led and line-managed a software engineering team, and can point to what you improved for the people and for the delivery.

• You have built and shipped web applications and stayed close enough to the work to still be useful in a codebase. Our stack is TypeScript, React and Node but a background in another web stack is fine.

• You have led AI/ML engineers, ideally having helped introduce that skillset into a team. You know where research-shaped work breaks an agile delivery process and how to adapt it.

• You want to manage. Engineering management is your craft, not the next rung after senior engineer.

• You have partnered with Product as an equal to shape priorities and push back on scope, not simply as a backlog administrator.

• You have handled the hard parts of underperformance, conflict, ambiguity, and telling senior people things they might find uncomfortable to hear.

• Ability to obtain and maintain UK Security Vetted status to at least SC level.

What will help you stand out

• You have grown a team rather than inherited one — hired into it, shaped it, and developed people into more senior roles.

• Experience delivering data-intensive, real-time, distributed or mission-critical products.

• Familiarity with defence, military modelling and simulation, C2 systems, or another regulated and security-conscious environment.

• A track record of building effective Engineering Manager / technical lead partnerships, or mentoring other managers.

• You want to be in the room where the product meets its users — travelling to deployments, hackathons and industry events, and turning what you see there into better decisions.

Job Benefits

• We make Hadean an awesome place to work with competitive benefits…

• Hybrid working with 1 day per week in our fantastic office in Shoreditch, London

• Private Health Insurance

• Enhanced pension scheme

• Enhanced parental leave

• 3 extra days off at Christmas (on top of our standard 25)

• L&D budget

• Regularly scheduled socials

• Share options

A Place For Everyone

We believe diversity drives innovation and for that reason we strongly encourage those from all backgrounds to apply for roles at Hadean. We are an equal opportunity employer and aim to build a workforce that is truly representative of the communities in which we operate and our clients.