Overview
Our client, a London-headquartered space-intelligence company is looking for a Technical Programme Manager to own delivery of its most technically demanding programmes. Our client builds the sovereign, AI-native space-intelligence capability that allied governments increasingly need as orbit becomes a more contested and congested environment - bringing together real scientific and technical depth, growing government traction, venture backing, and work that matters to national resilience and the safe use of space.
The business is vertically integrated: it owns the optical sensors that generate the raw data, builds the catalogue of objects from that data, and sells the high-value intelligence layered on top - from a non-US, UK-sovereign and allied posture.
The Role
This is a senior technical delivery appointment. The company's edge is the speed at which it moves research into product and product into operational service. The risk that comes with that speed is work stalling between prototype and production, or reaching operations before it is ready. The Technical Programme Manager is how that pipeline becomes governed and visible: the person who turns customer requirements and R&D initiatives into structured, well-run delivery, and carries a capability from an early customer conversation through to a productised, deployable, sellable system.
Reporting to the Chief Operating Officer, you'll sit between the customer and requirements end - understanding what a customer actually needs and translating that into something the business can build - and the R&D and engineering end, turning that into governed, sequenced delivery.
Key Responsibilities
- Decompose complex, often ambiguous customer and internal requirements into structured work packages with clear ownership, acceptance criteria and timelines
- Build and maintain the plans, schedules and dependency maps that give leadership visibility of progress, risk and resource need
- Drive release planning with engineering teams across parallel streams, working inside an agile setting while operating the stage-gate discipline that keeps novel and low-TRL work moving deliberately from prototype toward operable product
- Act as the CTO's programme-management partner, holding a single register of the R&D portfolio and operationalising the innovation stage-gate so ideas mature with the artefact trail that IP and assurance need
- Own the day-to-day delivery relationship with customers on product and platform programmes, keeping their confidence on schedule, status and risk
- Provide programme and systems delivery content for bids
- Partner closely with the software lead and engineering teams, drawing on the Principal Systems Engineer as a resource
- Carry several concurrent programmes from day one, including Pattern of Life work, next-generation sensor and monitoring development, and delivery to sovereign and allied customers
Essential Skills & Experience
- Strong technical programme management of complex, multi-team software, platform or technology programmes, delivered to schedule and quality in a fast-moving environment
- Genuinely technical: a background close to engineering, credible with engineers, comfortable on architecture and delivery trade-offs, able to translate technical reality into schedule, cost and risk
- Proven ability to decompose large, ambiguous requirements into structured plans with clear milestones, dependencies and ownership
- Release planning and delivery governance across concurrent workstreams
- Systems-engineering fluency and its proportionate application in programme governance: requirements, traceability, interfaces and configuration control
- Coordinating R&D and low-TRL work and moving it toward product, including stage-gate discipline
- Customer delivery management, maintaining confidence and driving success across major contracts, including with sovereign and government customers
- UK national; eligible for UK security clearance (SC, and DV for some programmes), given the classified nature of some programme work. UK sole nationality (UKEO) preferred
Desirable Skills & Experience
- Background in space domain awareness, defence, intelligence, orbital surveillance, or complex scientific-instrument delivery
- Experience with AI/ML-enabled systems, and an appetite to use, and build, AI tooling in the delivery role itself
- Agile delivery at scale, and fluency with tooling such as Jira or Azure DevOps
- Writing programme and systems content for bids and proposals, and insight into how bids are evaluated
Person Specification
The defining quality is being genuinely technical and genuinely a delivery leader at once: credible with engineers, able to hold your own on architecture and delivery trade-offs, and trusted to bring structure without slowing teams down. This role suits someone who wants to own their area, drives rather than waits for direction, and is comfortable that roles and structure will keep evolving around them.
You'll bring structure and governance without slowing teams down - proportionate process, not bureaucracy. You're a driver who takes ownership and makes the call under ambiguity rather than waiting for direction, and you build process by bringing people with you, through education and collaboration rather than top-down mandate. You're calm, organised and credible across both technical and leadership audiences, independent and self-directed in a fast-paced, low-oversight environment, and willing to speak up in a busy room. A European sensibility and pace suits the way this business works.
What's On Offer
- Competitive base salary + performance-related bonus
- Hybrid working (c. 2 days/week in office - London), with international travel as programme phases require
- Genuine ownership: you'd take technical programmes end to end and be trusted to run them your way, building the delivery practice the company grows into
How to Apply
This appointment is being managed exclusively by Banner Lane Ltd on behalf of the client organisation. Interested candidates are invited to contact the recruiting consultant directly for a confidential discussion through Linked In or directly to Banner Lane Ltd.
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