About Tidalis
Do you want to be part of our innovative team that helps protect “The Great Barrier Reef”, make our waterways safer and more secure and optimize the efficiency of the world’s largest ports? Then keep reading! We serve clients around the globe with advanced solutions in the areas of maritime traffic, ports, and terminals. Together, we ensure the safe and efficient movement of people and goods in the maritime world.
Your Role
The Software Engineering Manager – VTS Tech Domains is responsible for driving engineering execution, organizational development, and technical excellence across all Vessel Traffic Services (VTS) product lines and technology domains. In this role, you ensure that our VTS solutions meet the highest standards of reliability, scalability, and performance, supporting our product‑led growth and global expansion ambitions.
As a key connector between Tech Domains, Product, and Solution Delivery, you will lead and coach four software engineering teams (5–6 engineers per team) and guide the team leads who manage these groups. You bring a clear strategic vision for how to structure, grow, and mature our engineering teams so they operate with optimal customer focus. This includes defining how teams collaborate, which development practices they adopt, and which tooling best supports efficiency, quality, and future scalability.
You will shape the functional and non‑functional technical roadmap and ensure that the VTS technology domains evolve their software and solutions to meet customer, operational, and regulatory demands in a rapidly changing maritime environment. A critical part of your mission is guiding the organization through the ongoing transformation from traditional on‑premise solutions toward a fully SaaS‑oriented product landscape. You help set the long‑term direction, make the right technical and organizational choices, and ensure our teams are equipped to build modern, cloud‑native solutions.
We are looking for a strategic leader with experience building, organizing, and steering multiple software teams—someone who brings direction, clarity, and a forward‑looking perspective to how we design, deliver, and scale our technology.
What will you do?
Leadership & Domain Ownership
- Own and execute the engineering strategy for all VTS-related products, platforms, and capabilities.
- Own the long-term technical vision and ensure alignment with product strategy and customer outcomes.
- Partner with Product Management to shape the VTS roadmap, ensuring scalability, modularity, and extensibility of solutions.
- Drive continuous improvement and innovation in VTS technologies, leveraging modern architectures, cloud-native practices, and emerging maritime standards.
Team Leadership & Talent Development
- Lead, mentor, and scale high-performing engineering teams across multiple VTS technology domains (e.g., traffic management, sensor fusion, communication systems, decision support, user interfaces).
- Build a strong leadership bench by developing Engineering Managers, Principal Engineers, and Technical Leads.
- Foster a culture of engineering excellence, collaboration, and accountability across distributed teams.
Delivery & Execution Excellence
- Ensure timely and high-quality delivery of VTS software components and solutions, aligned with product milestones and customer commitments.
- Establish and oversee engineering practices, including CI/CD, automated testing, DevSecOps, and site reliability.
- Partner closely with Solution Delivery to support customer deployments and integration efforts.
- Oversee forward-deployed engineering capacity in VTS streams to ensure field adaptability and customer satisfaction.
Technical Governance & Architecture
- Provide architectural leadership and ensure coherent system design across all VTS modules.
- Champion engineering standards, security-by-design principles, and regulatory compliance (e.g., IALA, IMO, IEC 62443).
- Review and approve key technical decisions, technology stack choices, and platform evolutions.
- Drive modernization initiatives (e.g., containerization, microservices, event-driven architecture).
Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Collaborate with Product management, Platform Engineering, Customer Teams, and Solution Delivery to ensure end-to-end value realization.
- Represent engineering in customer discussions, proposals, and strategic projects as a domain expert.
- Contribute to strategic partnerships and technical alliances in the VTS ecosystem.
What do you bring?
- Strategic Leadership: Proven experience defining and executing engineering strategy aligned to business outcomes.
- Technical Depth: Expert understanding of distributed systems, microservices, real-time data processing, and cloud-native platforms.
- Delivery Excellence: Strong track record of delivering complex software products with high reliability, scalability, and security.
- Team Leadership: Experience building and scaling high-performing engineering teams across geographies.
- Customer Orientation: Ability to bridge technical execution with customer outcomes, especially in mission-critical domains.
Key qualifications
- 10+ years in software engineering, with 5+ years in engineering leadership roles, in context that focus on productizing software rather than custom software.
- Demonstrated success delivering mission-critical or safety-critical software systems is a plus (e.g., maritime, aerospace, transportation, defense, or others) .
- Proven experience leading multi-team engineering organizations in a SaaS or platform environment.
- Deep knowledge of real-time control systems, sensor integration, data streaming, and/or maritime communications (AIS, radar, etc.) preferred.
- Familiarity with secure software development practices and regulatory compliance.
- Experience with DevOps, CI/CD, cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP), and containerized architectures.
Preferred Domain Experience (Highly Advantageous)
- Maritime VTS, coastal surveillance, or navigation technology solutions.
- Sensor fusion and maritime situational awareness platforms.
- Large-scale distributed systems or mission-critical SaaS products.
