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Thales

Global defense and aerospace electronics

Design Authority AI

Engineering LeadershipConfirmed live in the last 24 hours
Full-timeIssy-les-Moulineaux, FranceNo salary listedHybrid

About the Job

Requirements

  • Be a graduate of an engineering school or hold a Master 2 (BAC+5) in systems engineering, software, artificial intelligence, or data.
  • Have at least 5 years of experience in architecture, systems engineering, technical governance, technical direction, or validation of complex solutions.
  • Have demonstrated experience evaluating, validating, or approving system, product, or solution architectures, ideally in critical or regulated environments.
  • Be proficient in architectures based on managed cloud services, Infrastructure as a Service, or containers such as Kubernetes and Docker.
  • Have strong knowledge of architectures for AI workloads and software components commonly used in AI and data.
  • Have experience integrating AI solutions into production environments.
  • Be able to assess architecture and technology fit to operational needs; maturity of technologies, components, and supplier dependencies; alignment with product and make/team/buy strategies; technical feasibility against costs, timelines, resources, and industrial organization; and credibility of risk-management plans.
  • Understand compliance requirements in defense and AI environments, including cybersecurity, security, safety, data protection, export controls, the AI Act, contractual constraints, offsets, and sovereignty.
  • Be able to formalize clear, reasoned validation decisions that can be used in project or product governance.
  • Be able to identify matters requiring additional review, independent expertise, technical-line arbitration, or management escalation.
  • Be able to work internationally under strict information compartmentalization, sensitive-asset protection, and access-control requirements.
  • Have strong written and oral communication skills in French and English.

Responsibilities

  • Provide an independent evaluation of proposed AI solutions.
  • Approve technical solutions through the Design Validation process across applicable phases.
  • Verify that solutions meet customer needs with a reasonable guarantee of success.
  • Ensure solutions align with technical strategy, architecture guidelines, and applicable make/team/buy principles.
  • Assess whether functional and technical architectures fit operational needs and mission constraints.
  • Challenge design choices concerning AI models, data pipelines, execution infrastructure, system interfaces, security mechanisms, and industrialization options.
  • Assess the maturity of technologies and components, including software building blocks, frameworks, open-source dependencies, third-party tools, sovereign platforms, and supplier components.
  • Verify compatibility with integration, qualification, support, and deployment constraints.
  • Verify compliance with contractual, regulatory, and normative requirements.
  • Ensure that solutions address cybersecurity and system-security constraints, data and sensitive-asset protection, export controls and usage restrictions, safety where required, AI regulation and trust requirements, sovereignty, hosting, localization, and access control.
  • Ensure architecture and collaboration arrangements follow need-to-know, information-compartmentalization, and country-eye-only protection rules.
  • Anticipate, identify, and consolidate key technical, cyber, and engineering risks.
  • Assess the credibility of risk-mitigation plans proposed by teams.
  • Issue clear validation decisions and, for conditional approval, specify reservations and associated action plans.
  • Escalate necessary decisions to the appropriate level of the technical line.
  • Participate in key offer reviews and milestones, presenting the Design Authority position.
  • Coordinate with Project Design Authorities, Engineering Delivery Managers, architects, project leads, and technical management.
  • Contribute to consolidated validations in complex environments involving multiple countries, business units, or subsystems.
  • Maintain solution-wide coherence when an overall architecture integrates components or assets across scopes with different access rules.
  • Define, with technical and security stakeholders, working arrangements compatible with classification, sovereignty, and need-to-know constraints.
  • Identify information-sharing limits between teams, countries, or entities and propose compliant collaboration methods.
  • Ensure reviews, analyses, documents, and validations use a level of detail appropriate to each participant’s access rights.
  • Help establish mechanisms that preserve the integrity of technical validation without unnecessarily exposing protected information.
  • Facilitate technical convergence across a dense, multi-stakeholder, technologically diverse engineering ecosystem.
  • Enable decisions based on facts, objective data, and explicit criteria rather than local preferences or implicit choices.
  • Support coherent solutions across diverse target environments, from frugal architectures to large-scale infrastructure.
  • Review and validate robust, secure AI architectures that support performance and innovation in critical customer sectors while meeting company security and efficiency standards.

Desired Qualifications

  • Experience in defense, critical systems, command and control, intelligence, optronics, radar, secure communications, or cyber defense is a strong advantage.
  • Experience in multi-country environments with sovereignty, classification, and country-eye-only constraints is particularly valued.

About the Company

Thales

Global defense and aerospace electronics

Thales designs and delivers critical technology for aerospace, defense, and digital security. Its products include electronics, software, and data-security systems that power air travel, payments, and modern military platforms, by integrating hardware and software to build systems such as avionics, radar, cybersecurity, and secure communications that collect sensor data and protect networks. It stands out through deep industrial experience, end-to-end solutions across defense, aerospace, and cybersecurity, and a focus on AI and quantum tech, aided by strategic acquisitions and partial state ownership. Its goal is to provide reliable, secure, and connected technologies that support national security, public safety, and everyday life by solving complex security and connectivity challenges.

Company size
10,001+
Company stage
IPO
Headquarters
Meudon, France
Founded
1893

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