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Role:  Engineering Manager Contract: Permanent Salary:  Competitive Location: Oxford (Didcot, Harwell)   Security clearance: This role requires eligibility for UK security clearance (BPSS and SC). SC requires 5 years of continuous UK residency. An active SC or DV clearance is a strong advantage. If you are not currently eligible, we will not be able to progress with your application. A note from the Founders Oxford Dynamics is at an inflection point. We build frontier technology for environments where the cost of a wrong decision is measured in lives, not revenue: defence, national security, and the convergence of AI and robotics. We are growing fast, and the constraint on how fast is no longer ideas or opportunity. It is whether our best engineers are set up to do their best work. That is the job we are hiring for. Not to add another layer, but to take direct ownership of a team of exceptional engineers and make them measurably more effective. You will be trusted to run your team with minimal oversight, held to a single high standard, and judged on one thing above all: whether the people in your care are producing work that matters, at the pace this mission demands. If you are the kind of leader who takes that ownership personally, who raises the bar rather than manages to it, and who wants to see the direct line from your team to systems deployed in the most demanding environments on earth, we would love to hear from you. Who We Are  Founded in 2019, Oxford Dynamics is a fast-growing UK frontier technology company developing both digital and physical AI systems built to operate in dynamic, mission-critical environments. At the core of everything we build is AVIS™ (A Very Intelligent System), our orchestration platform: the intelligence layer that fuses multi-modal data, including text, imagery, telemetry and sensor feeds, so operators can interrogate complex information at speed and make better decisions under pressure. AVIS™ powers our digital decision products, such as ORION for multi-source decision-to-effect, and it powers our physical platforms, including STRIDER for CBRN operations and BARBARIAN for explosive ordnance disposal. The same brain reasons across the screen and the machine. We work where wrong decisions can be catastrophic, partnering with defence and security organisations internationally to help protect nations, infrastructure and lives. Requirements The Role As Engineering Manager, you own the engineers: their productivity, their growth, their performance, and the day-to-day conditions they need to deliver. This is a people-first leadership role, distinct from delivery management and distinct from product. Delivery owns what ships and when. Product owns what we build and why. You own the people who build it and whether they are effective. That ownership is real. If the team is not delivering the return the business needs, that is yours to diagnose and fix, not to explain. The single standard for this role is simple: are your engineers producing work that matters, at pace, and are they getting better while they do it. Everything else in this description is in service of that. You will run your team autonomously, within the technical direction set by the CTO. You are trusted with judgement calls and expected to make them. You will hold the technical bar high, unblock and develop your people, and build the mechanisms that make your team's delivery visible, so leadership does not have to ask whether the team is on track. They will be able to see it.   This is not a pure people-management role. You need enough engineering depth to be credible in technical discussions, to make sound calls on design and quality, and, critically, to know the difference between a real blocker and an excuse. You will not be the primary delivery resource, and you do not need to be the strongest coder on the team. But when a piece of work is late or an outc