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Proud to be part of Thales’s world-leading Electronic Warfare team

Seb Mitchison, Deputy Product Design Authority

For over 70 years, the UK has been a leading pioneer in Electronic Warfare, with Thales’s specialists playing a pivotal role in the development of sovereign protection for the UK. 

Here Seb Mitchison, Deputy Product Design Authority at Thales, explains how successful collaboration and partnerships have played an important role in achieving this success, as well as supporting achievements within his own career.

 

What are the different roles involved in delivering Thales’s pivotal Electronic Warfare technology?

For each Electronic Warfare product that we create, we have a team of people responsible for delivering a capability that meets the customer’s needs. 

At a senior level this includes three figureheads who work together to ensure that a capable solution is delivered within budget and on time: 

  1. Project Manager – responsible for personnel, budget, and schedule
  2. Systems Engineering Manager – responsible for the engineering process, how things are done and delivered.
  3. Design Authority – responsible for the technical solution in terms of capability, cost and the feasibility of delivering on schedule

Collaboration is key to achieving these aims and challenging and questioning each other is a crucial part of ensuring that we deliver the highest quality, world-leading capability to our customers.

What do you love most about your role at Thales?

It’s a privilege to help develop technology that saves lives and protects national interests worldwide. 

We work with technology that is truly state-of-the-art and when we trial the technology in the laboratory, we are the first people in the world to see it in action, which is really exciting.

Electronic Warfare is a specialist, complex subject, which brings its own challenges. However, I thrive on overcoming these challenges, and as a career, I would recommend it to anyone who wants to work with leading-edge technology, whilst solving difficult problems. 

Being employed at Thales has enabled me to work with some of the best Electronic Warfare specialists in the world, which has been fundamental to my career development. It has been amazing to work alongside such highly skilled people, who are passionate about what they do. The impact they have had upon the development of Electronic Warfare capability in the UK is unquestionable. 

Many of our specialists joined Thales following successful careers in the military, which has meant they can draw upon their operational experience to provide unparalleled insight into using the equipment in the live environment. Their first-hand experience has informed the design of our technologies and enabled us to develop a unique set of skills and products, of which we are immensely proud.

The systems we create are instrumental to providing situational awareness and tactical advantage to customers, such as the Royal Navy. If the UK was unable to deliver these technologies, the Ministry of Defence would be reliant on overseas companies and subjected to the regulations of foreign powers, which could lead to vulnerabilities. 

Being employed at Thales has enabled me to work with some of the best Electronic Warfare specialists in the world

What does the future of Electronic Warfare look like?

Taking onboard ideas from our research and development teams and feedback from our customers, we are currently working on the next generation of Radar Electronic Support Measures (RESM) that are smarter, lighter and faster than our existing capability. 

The way that we develop products in response to customer’s needs, and alongside partnering companies that can help us to deliver the latest innovations, is one of the reasons why we have maintained a 70 year partnership with the Royal Navy.

Looking to the future, we are exploring the use of Artificial Intelligence to analyse signal processing data and improve the effectiveness of our systems.

The threat landscape is also changing, and we need to ensure our Electronic Warfare solutions can protect against an increasing number of cyber-attacks that are carried out through harnessing the electromagnetic spectrum.
 

What led you to have a career within Electronic Warfare?

Given my interest in maths and physics, one of my teachers at college recommended that I should consider choosing electronics as one of my subjects. It turned out to be good advice – from day one, I have never looked back. 

In 2010, I started a Master’s Degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Nottingham where I graduated with a first. During my final year, I applied for a job at Thales on their Graduate Scheme and in 2014 I was appointed in a full time role as a Systems Engineer.

Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary field, so from the start my role was extremely varied. I got to work with people across mechanical, software and hardware engineering disciplines and learned a number of different specialisms from system processing, to system architecture and firmware engineering. 

In 2017, I took a short break from Thales to develop firmware for McLaren Formula 1 racing cars, but within a couple of years I was back as Deputy Product Design Authority for our latest Electronic Warfare capability and I hope to progress to the role of Design Authority in the coming years.