NATS is the UK’s leading air navigation service provider, handling over 2.4 million flights each year. We provide air traffic control services from two control centres and at airports around the UK. We also provide a wide range of commercial products and solutions internationally. Our people are at the heart of our purpose to advance aviation and keep the skies safe.
Salary: £54,328.31 - £72,437.75
Closing Date: Monday 3rd August 2026
PURPOSE OF JOB:
The Operational Support Engineer provides engineering knowledge as directed by experienced engineers. Performs assigned maintenance, repair, modification, and inspection tasks on Air Traffic Management systems/applications.
We’re excited to share an excellent opportunity for a Surveillance (Radar Related) Operational Support Engineer to join our dynamic team.
In this role, you’ll play a crucial part in maintaining service resilience across the entire lifecycle while driving continuous improvement. Your work will focus on our safety-critical Surveillance/Radar infrastructure, which underpins the controller-facing systems/applications responsible for the safe movement of over 7,000 aircraft every day.
As an Operational Support Engineer you’ll support delivering and operating radar data processing systems and flight alerting tools. You’ll be part of the Surveillance Support Group, which covers supporting hardware and software for our Radar Related and alerting systems.
PRINCIPAL ACCOUNTABILITIES:
- Maintenance: Expected to carry out routine administration, maintenance, and service support of designated systems/applications.
- Incident Management: Apply domain knowledge to assigned/escalated Incidents, assist in prioritising, diagnosing, resolving and recording them using agreed procedures to restore service resilience.
- Problem Management: Support the analysis of service events and Incidents to initiate and undertake Problem Management activities to continuously improve service.
- Competency Management: Gain, hold, and maintain the competencies necessary to control and configure systems/applications, enabling the restoration of technical services, deploy planned changes and carry out planned maintenance.
- Prioritisation and Deconfliction: Working with the wider team, prioritises and deconflicts planned work to ensure a safe delivery of the service.
- Service Configuration: Ensure relevant processes and tools are utilised to deploy service configuration changes, records remain accurate, complete, and current.
- Document Management: Produce, review, and amend engineering instructions as directed.
- Service Asset Management: Proactively ensure service assets are in a known state and in the correct location for use.
- Safety Culture: Be an advocate for Safety Culture, promoting and advancing best practice, challenging poor behaviours, and ensuring personal health & safety (H&S) by adhering to H&S procedures.
- Training: Provide assistance and support the delivery of on-the-job training within their area of expertise.
- Duty Engineer Role: Includes responsibilities for the Duty Engineer role (Be the first point of contact for service resolution - To initiate and progress actions to rectify issues relating to service availability and business continuity).
- Continual Service Improvement: Responsible for the identification of continuous service improvement.
- Stakeholder Management: Communicates with internal and external stakeholders, maintaining effective working relationships.
- Project Work: Support project requirements and activities.
AUTONOMY:
- Autonomy: Working in a safety critical environment, supported by defined processes and procedures that are trained and assessed. Liaises directly with Service Management to resolve Incidents and Problems with Service Management retaining oversight. Where defined processes and procedures do not deliver outcomes the service resolution remains within the accountability of the Service Management leadership.
SCOPE OF JOB:
- On Call/Out of Hours: These posts are liable for on-call as part of the 24-hour support organisation. There may be the need to provide telephone support or attend out of hours for service restoration to meet agreed service levels, or to deploy service changes in line with the defined procedures.
- Environments: Operates across multiple NATS environments, including Production, Pre production, Training, Simulation, and Testing and Development environments.
EXPERIENCE, QUALIFICATIONS & SKILLS:
- Qualifications: Professional engineering qualification to Higher National Certificate (Level 4 or SQF Level 7) as a minimum Electronics, Telecommunications or Computer Science or other relevant Engineering discipline
In lieu of the above qualifications the candidate will be required to demonstrate one of the following alternative criteria:
- Relevant lower-level engineering qualifications such as an Apprenticeship coupled with demonstrable engineering experience in a relevant field (May include but not limited to: Military, Rail, other Safety Critical environment)
- Evidence of substantial experience gained in a relevant transferable environment (such as ATSEP) gained over a significant period
- Experience of resolution of incidents, service restoration, incident and problem management of systems and equipment in a Safety Critical environment such as but not limited to Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs), Military or Rail. Shall demonstrate an understanding of safety critical systems and the impact they may have within our operational environment.
- Communication Skills: Effective oral and written communication skills.
- Problem-Solving Skills: Ability to work calmly, systematically, and analytically when working in a safety-related context.
- Teamwork: Ability to work in teams and take responsibility for allocated actions.
- Culture and Behaviours: Demonstrates an understanding of working in a safety critical environment, specifically with regards to the importance of establishing a safe and just culture backed by the correct behaviours, attitude and standards.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
What We’re Looking For:
- Air Traffic or radar related knowledge
- Linux experience is a strong advantage
- Virtualisation experience
- Systems engineering experience
- Strong IT/Computing skills
This role will, when appropriately trained, will form part of the on-call 24hour support roster with team colleagues. This will require, when on call, access to site within 1 hour to enable service restoration if required.
If you’re passionate about maintaining the reliability of critical Surveillance / Radar systems and have the expertise to match, we’d love to hear from you!
Terms and Conditions:
On Call/Out of Hours: These posts are liable for on-call as part of the 24-hour support organisation. There may be the need to provide telephone support or attend out of hours for service restoration to meet agreed service levels, or to deploy service changes in line with the defined procedures.
We are proud to offer a fantastic total reward package to help you thrive both personally and professionally - for more information on what NATS can offer you please visit - Why NATS? - NATS'
We have adopted agile working to provide greater flexibility and increased choice over working arrangements, with the opportunity for this role to work in our modern office facilities as well as remotely. We also welcome discussions on flexible and part-time working arrangements.
If you share our passion to advance aviation and keep the skies safe – we would like to hear from you whatever your age, sex, race, faith, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, visible or invisible disability. Individuals that bring different perspectives, skills, life experiences and backgrounds help us be at the forefront of our industry.
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