Manager, IA Engineering

About Thales

Construisons ensemble un avenir de confiance

Thales est un leader mondial des hautes technologies spécialisé dans trois secteurs d’activité : Défense & Sécurité, Aéronautique & Spatial, et Cyber & Digital. Il développe des produits et solutions qui contribuent à un monde plus sûr, plus respectueux de l’environnement et plus inclusif. Le Groupe investit près de 4 milliards d’euros par an en Recherche & Développement, notamment dans des domaines clés de l’innovation tels que l’IA, la cybersécurité, le quantique, les technologies du cloud et la 6G. Thales compte près de 81 000 collaborateurs dans 68 pays.

Our commitments, your benefits

• A success driven by our technological excellence, your experience and our shared ambition
• An attractive compensation package
• Continuous skills development: training courses, academies and internal communities
• An inclusive, caring environment that respects employees' work-life balance
• Recognized social and environmental commitment

Your daily life

By joining us in La Ciotat, you will be part of a site ideally located on the Mediterranean coast, within an international environment bringing together our digital identity and security activities.

Within Cybersecurity and Digital Identity (CDI), the Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) centralizes cloud expertise to accelerate Thales' digital transformation. The CCoE is organized around three product levels — Cloud Start, Cloud Boost, and Cloud Scale — and supports several Business Lines, including Mobile Connectivity Solutions (MCS), Payment Services (PAY), and Identity & Biometric Solutions (IBS).

The IA Engineering department manages two strategic products:

• Jarvis (Cloud Start): internal developer control tower and evolving agent orchestrator
• Synapse (Cloud Scale): managed AI gateway and GenAI services platform

The position manages a hybrid team of approximately 12 developers across 2 squads, with a direct impact on delivery speed, technical reliability, and the CCoE's broader pay-per-use / FinOps trajectory.

Your missions:

People Management

• Assume career development, performance reviews, and mentoring for both squads
• Identify skill gaps and develop individual growth plans via the Thales Technical Ladder and the Oxygen learning platform
• Foster collaboration, psychological safety, and continuous learning in a mixed product/service environment

Delivery & Strategy

• Co-own priorities with the Product Owners of Jarvis and Synapse, balancing business value and technical feasibility
• Maintain velocity and quality across both squads, from rapid feature cycles (Jarvis) to reliability-focused deliveries (Synapse)
• Define and enforce delivery rituals, milestones, and release governance
• Align with the CCoE SRE team on SLOs and error budgets for both products
• Drive the shift towards agentic usage by evolving Jarvis towards proactive, self-evolving orchestration
• Translate business priorities into executable roadmaps aligned with CCoE strategy

Technical Oversight

• Provide architecture direction tailored to each squad:

• Jarvis: full-stack decisions, UX standards, developer experience
• Synapse: API design, reliability engineering, third-party AI integration models

• Act as a technical referent without becoming a delivery bottleneck

Cross-functional Collaboration

• Build a solid EM/PO operating model on Jarvis and Synapse
• Partner with designers and executive stakeholders across CDI Business Lines
• Escalate risks early and clearly negotiate scope/schedule trade-offs
• Contribute to the CCoE's transition from centralized control to a delegated operating model

Your profile

• You hold a Master's degree in engineering or are a graduate of an engineering school

• Proven experience, minimum 5 years, in managing engineering teams of 8–15 people, ideally across multiple squads or workflows

• Solid software engineering background to establish technical credibility with senior engineers

• Demonstrated experience in product and platform/services development environments

• Hands-on exposure to AI agents, agentic systems, or autonomous AI orchestration at product scale

• Experience operating in ambiguous contexts and transforming uncertainty into delivery clarity

• Fluent in English; French is a plus

• People Leadership: coaching, performance management, team health, talent development

• Delivery Leadership: planning, prioritization, execution pace, predictability

• Technical Leadership across full-stack products and API/reliability domains

• Stakeholder Communication: ability to explain trade-offs to technical and non-technical audiences

• Cross-functional Collaboration with Product, SRE, Design, and business stakeholders

Ideally, you have:

• Familiarity with data-driven operating models for FinOps / GreenOps / SecOps
• Experience with internal platform products in multi-cloud environments
• Proven success in scaling agentic or GenAI-powered products

Thales, a company committed to disability inclusion, recognizes all talents. Diversity is our greatest asset. Apply and join us!