The Aviation Innovation Research (AIR) Lab

The joint CAAS-Thales innovation lab known as ‘AIR Lab’ started to operate on 1st November 2019 with the objective to develop Proof of Concepts (POCs) or Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) of advanced and open technologies for future Air Traffic Management (ATM). Currently, the joint lab employs a team of 40 Thales engineers and 12 CAAS engineers and air traffic controllers operating in a vibrant ecosystem involving a number of Singaporean SMEs and start-ups, as well as key research institutes.

Thales engineers include 10 domain experts – with more than 10 years of experience – coming from Thales ATM centres of competence in France and Australia. These experts are coaching both the local Thales and CAAS engineers.

The POCs and MVPs are co-developed with the CAAS engineers who have access to the same development tools and environment used by the Thales Engineers (provided by the Singapore branch of Thales Digital Factory). The POCs and MVPs are defined in collaboration with CAAS air traffic controllers through iterative workshops.

AIR Lab research outcomes will feed the next generation of products, including clearly disruptive outcomes addressing Safety and Security for Open architecture, data driven ATM Twin, Green Aviation, Trajectory Based Operations.

As the AIR Lab was recently extended for another 3 years, 4 work streams are now embarked:

Regional Experimental Platform, FF-ICE/TBO, Green Aviation, Future-proof Interoperable Platform-Agnostic, Safe and Secure Platforms.

AIR Lab 2.0 continues to benefit from research conducted in Europe through new architecture research which, among other objectives, aims at meeting much stricter safety standards for ground ATM systems in development by the European Aviation Safety Authority (EASA). This breakthrough architecture study is co-funded by the French government (CASSIOPEA).

Regional Experimental Platform (REP) has been initiated in AIR Lab 1.0, and has the view to addressing regional needs in coordination with the SESAR 3 activities conducted in AMS France.

Whom We Are Looking For

As a Software Engineer in AIR Lab, you are seen by the members of your scrum team to be not only a pillar of strength but a source of motivation and inspiration as well. You should be someone who cares about the quality of the technical implementation and delivery as much as you care about the quality of your code. You should be someone who enjoys working in a team of diverse people with multiple ethnic and cultural backgrounds. You should be someone who enjoys diving into the technical details of figuring out a problem and also be able to communicate the solution back to the team so that the members can learn from it. You should be someone who loves learning new technologies and find innovative ways to apply newfound knowledge and be courageous to encourage fellow team members to be like YOU and enjoy participating in all aspects of engineering activities in the AIR Lab.

Responsibilities:

• Understand the functional aspects of the delivery and able to constructively discuss with the Product Owner
• Responsible for the availability or a regular product increment incorporating new features.
• Complete all fundamental tasks for the delivery of new functionality from Application Architecture, Design, Implementation to the tests phase (unit tests, functional tests, and performance tests).
• To implement features by defining test, develop feature and associated automated tests. If appropriate implement security tests and load tests.
• Write and review the necessary technical documentation.
• Decide and implement team level code quality standards.

· Work in an agile, cross-functional multinational team, actively engaging to support the success of the team.

Requirements:

Education

· Bachelors in Computer Science or Information Technology with a minimum of 2 years of working experience.

· Mid-career switchers are encouraged to apply if you demonstrate relevant working experience of a minimum 3 years.

Essential Skills/Experience

• Working knowledge of designing and building software applications using Java and/or Kotlin as a main programming language, between 2 to 3 years; a bonus is if you have experience designing and deploying RESTful APIs (i.e., proxy versus reverse proxy)
• Demonstrated application of Abstract Data Types, Algorithm Complexity Analysis
• Demonstrated application of Software Design Patterns using Java and/or Kotlin (e.g., Builder, Façade, Observer/Strategy)
• Demonstrated application of Advanced Software Design Patterns (e.g., Saga, Event Sourcing), Software Testing (e.g., Unit Testing, Integration Testing)
• Demonstrated application of working with Continuous Integration and/or Continuous Delivery models; you are expected to be familiar with using Linux (e.g., shell commands)
• Good communication skills in English

Desirable Skills/Experience

• Working knowledge of designing and building virtualized & containerized environments (e.g., Kaniko, Docker, Virtual Machine)
• Working knowledge of deploying containers to public clouds (e.g., Azure Cloud, AWS, GCP) and Kubernetes
• Working knowledge of designing and building software applications within Event-Driven Architectures, message broker technology Kafka
• Bonus if you demonstrate a working understanding of designing application with a “shift-left” cybersecurity approach.
• Bonus if you demonstrate knowledge of other languages (e.g., Python, Scala, Go, TypeScript, C, C++, Java)
• Bonus if you demonstrate knowledge of designing software applications that manipulates data (structured, unstructured format) working with Data Lake and/or Lakehouse implementations (e.g., Delta Lake, Databricks, Azure Data Lake)
• Bonus if you demonstrate working knowledge of designing large-scale ETL using frameworks like Apache Flink, Apache Spark and the like.
• Bonus if you demonstrate working knowledge of working with the Elastic Search stack.
• Bonus if you demonstrate previous experience with AI/ML framework.

Essential / Desirable Traits

· Possess learning agility, flexibility and pro-activity

· Comfortable with agile teamwork and customer engagement

YOUR CAREER AT THALES

Future opportunities will allow you to discover other domains or sites. You will be able to evolve and grow your competencies in different areas:

• Room and attention to personal development

• Build your talents in another domain of Thales Group, discovering new products, new customers, new country or go to a more complex Solution.

• Choose between a technical expertise or a leadership path

• Build an international career within a leading Engineering Group