Hardware Team Leader

Location: Rochester (onsite)
Salary: £55,000 – £65,000

Copello are recruiting for a Hardware Team Leader to join a leading engineering and technology business delivering advanced safety-critical systems across the aerospace and defence sector.

This is an excellent opportunity to lead a highly skilled hardware engineering team supporting complex production programmes across cutting-edge products including Helmet Mounted & Head-Up Displays, Mission Computers, Flight Controls, Active Inceptors, and other associated technologies.

The Role

As Hardware Team Leader, you will provide both technical and people leadership to an experienced electronics design team, ensuring successful delivery across key production and engineering programmes.

You’ll play a pivotal role in driving engineering excellence, managing work packages, and supporting the ongoing optimisation of team capability and performance.

Key Responsibilities

• Providing technical and managerial leadership to an electronics design team
• Managing work packages including cost, schedule, risks, and opportunities
• Ensuring engineering support is aligned to production programme requirements
• Driving technical governance and ensuring adherence to engineering processes
• Leading cost and performance trade-off activities across programmes
• Supporting continuous improvement initiatives and team development

Skills & Experience Required

• Proven leadership experience managing engineering teams throughout the full product development lifecycle
• Strong understanding of cost and planning management tools, work package control, and dependency management
• Experience identifying and implementing improvements to working practices and team capability
• Knowledge of root cause analysis, failure reduction, and reliability improvement methodologies
• Experience within safety-critical systems environments is highly desirable
• Familiarity with requirements management and project management tools such as DOORS, MSP, or JIRA would be advantageous

What’s on Offer

This opportunity offers the chance to work on innovative, technically challenging projects within a collaborative and experienced multidisciplinary environment. The role also provides strong long-term career development opportunities within a growing and highly specialised sector.