Chief Technologist

Location: Reading, United Kingdom

In fast changing markets, customers worldwide rely on Thales. Thales is a business where brilliant people from all over the world come together to share ideas and inspire each other. In aerospace, transportation, defence, security and space, our architects design innovative solutions that make our tomorrow's possible.

Together we offer fantastic opportunities for committed employees to learn and develop their career with us. At Thales UK, we research, develop, and supply technology and services that impact the lives of millions of people each day to make life better, and keep us safer. We innovate across five major industries; Aerospace, Defence, Ground Transportation, Security and Space. Your health and well-being matters to us and that’s why we offer you the flexibility to do what’s important to you; whether that’s part time hours, job sharing, home working, or the ability to flex your start and finish times. Where possible, we support a working pattern that suits your lifestyle and helps you reach your ambitions.

**Primary Purpose of the Role**:
**Principal Relationships**:

- Reports to Director of Autonomy Technology Centre (ATC)
- Line management of some technical members of the ATC
- Close team working with all ‘core’ and wider team members of the ATC
- Build and maintain network of relevant, technical contacts across all Thales businesses present in the UK, such as Project Line Architects and Technical Directors
- Close engagement with CTO, RTI and KTDs
- External Innovation Hubs and Academic Engagement

**Key Responsibilities and Tasks**:

- Work alongside the other domain experts to provide a full robotics and autonomous systems knowledge stack - the focus of this role is on data interpretation, the use and limitations of AI, the ability to provide context aware autonomy through sensor processing and sensor fusion.
- Expert knowledge in reviewing complex perception and algorithm concepts, ensuring they will be fit for purpose, technically underwriting the solution.
- Developing requirement specifications for AI and sensor teams to develop products that meet the requirement of our projects.
- Understand the capabilities across the breadth of Thales to maximise exploitation opportunities of collaborative development.
- Drive our market position through customer engagement, ensuring we are recognised as experts in uncrewed system technology.
- Business development through solutioneering customer problems and ensuring our SFR&D is well positioned to future challenges.
- Influence Product Roadmaps, SBPs and TISPs to align with the technical strategy for autonomous functions to maximise exploitation potential for autonomy-related technologies across Thales; constantly striving to cut costs, reduce risks and increase agility.
- Facilitate international cooperation for autonomy-related capabilities right across Thales.
- Monitor potentially relevant technologies emerging in all domains for autonomous systems.
- Generate thought leadership material to influence the thinking and direction of travel of internal
- and external-customers utilising autonomous technologies in their sector.
- Ideally a domain expert in either Land or Air autonomy, aware of certification challenges, regulatory concerns, approach to ethics approvals and the direction of travel for the market/customer.

**Skills and Qualifications**:

- An expert in algorithms and perception engines
- Interest in broader aspects of technology insertion, including doctrine, ethics, and legislative aspects
- Confident, able to liaise / interface with customers and suppliers
- Excellent analytical skills, with proven capability to shape solutions out of complexity
- Excellent technical report writing skills
- Excellent presentation skills to inspire and enthuse collaborators to align behind our vision
- Strong networking skills and articulate, with experience of dealing with Customers, Partners and/or Suppliers in the development of systems
- Detailed understanding of the complete Engineering lifecycle

**Experience**:

- Knowledge of key trends in autonomy technologies and the passion to steer the capability in Thales to profitably benefit from these trends
- Experience of working with academic and/or industrial research laboratories in autonomy technologies.
- Business-savvy, with an entrepreneurial streak when it comes to seeking out and developing new products and capabilities.
- A breadth of knowledge across multiple domains is beneficial

**Values & Behaviours**:

- Striving to succeed
- Collaborative, open, wanting to share knowledge not harvest it
- Flexible, willing to put their hand to anything even outside their expertise to help the team succeed
- Engaging, internally and externally, the technology is exciting but complex, the ability to express your ideas to a wide degree of non-experts to experts is critical
- Role model for STEM outreach activities

At Thales we provide CAREERS and not only