Senior Manager – Knowledge Management in Crawley

Location: Hybrid, based at VHQ Crawley, 3 days per week on site

Hours: Full time, 37.5 hours per week, Monday to Friday

Contract Type: Permanent

Closing Date: 23rd March 2026

We review applications on a rolling basis and may close the advert early if we receive a high volume of applications.

Join us at an exciting moment for Data & AI and travel. At Virgin Atlantic, we believe everyone can take on the world. As we continue our journey to become the most loved travel company, we are investing boldly in technology, Data & AI to transform how we operate, serve our customers and empower our people.

Aviation is entering a new era shaped by intelligent automation, advanced analytics and AI-enabled decision-making. From operational performance to customer experience, the ability to harness trusted, structured data at scale will define the next generation of travel. We are building those foundations now, and this role offers a rare opportunity to help shape that future from within.

In a nutshell, knowledge is one of our most powerful assets, but only when it is structured, governed and engineered to work at scale. As our Senior Manager, Knowledge Management, you will define and lead the enterprise knowledge engineering strategy across Virgin Atlantic. This is not a traditional documentation or content management role. It sits firmly within Data & AI, focused on designing the data, metadata and governance foundations that enable AI systems, automation and decision-support tools to operate with trusted, high-quality context.

You will shape and embed the standards, metadata models and governance frameworks that ensure knowledge across Customer, Operations, Finance, People, Commercial, Corporate & Legal, and Digital & Technology is structured and operationalised consistently. From evolving our Enterprise Knowledge Graph to shaping ontology and lifecycle standards, you will help enable enterprise search, Copilot and agentic workflows across the organisation. This is a rare opportunity to build the foundations that turn knowledge into measurable operational and strategic advantage.

Day to day:

• Define and implement enterprise knowledge engineering and governance standards aligned to the Data & AI strategy
• Design and evolve ontologies, metadata schemas and structured knowledge models
• Oversee the development and optimisation of the Enterprise Knowledge Graph and associated data stores
• Partner with Data Engineering and AI teams to design ingestion, transformation, enrichment and retrieval pipelines
• Improve retrieval, grounding and context pipelines for AI systems, including vector-based retrieval
• Establish lifecycle, lineage, ownership and quality controls across knowledge platforms
• Identify gaps in the current technology stack and define the target-state architecture
• Influence senior stakeholders to adopt consistent ownership, governance and data design principles
• Lead and develop a specialist team spanning Data, Governance and AI

About you:

We are looking for a technically credible leader with deep experience in data engineering and structured knowledge design at enterprise scale. You will bring the judgement and authority to shape strategy, set standards and lead the design of knowledge, metadata and AI context capabilities that improve business performance, governance and operational efficiency. You will be equally comfortable influencing senior stakeholders and working hands-on with delivery teams to ensure solutions are practical, trusted and scalable.

You will bring clear evidence of:

• Proven experience designing and implementing enterprise metadata models, ontologies, taxonomies or structured knowledge architectures
• Hands-on experience building, improving or overseeing ingestion, transformation, enrichment, indexing or retrieval pipelines within modern data platforms
• Strong experience across structured and unstructured data, and how they are connected to support enterprise use cases
• Experience with graph databases, knowledge graph technologies, vector stores or AI-enabled retrieval systems
• Strong understanding of how structured data and knowledge models support AI use cases such as enterprise search, RAG, copilots and agentic workflows
• Experience defining and embedding governance frameworks covering data quality, lifecycle, lineage, provenance, versioning and ownership
• Experience operating in complex, regulated or risk-sensitive environments where control, auditability and assurance are critical
• A background in data engineering, data management, information architecture or a related field, with progression into AI-enabled data and knowledge design
• Experience leading specialist technical teams and influencing across a matrix organisation

Desirable experience includes exposure to modern data environments, enterprise knowledge graph technologies, and transformation-led settings where operating models, standards or governance approaches were built from the ground up.

You combine architectural thinking with delivery credibility. You can move confidently between strategic design discussions and detailed technical conversations, and clearly articulate how well-structured, well-governed knowledge drives better decisions, stronger compliance and more effective AI outcomes.

Be yourself – Our differences make us stronger

Our customers come from all walks of life and so do our colleagues. That’s why we’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer and actively encourage applications from all backgrounds. At Virgin Atlantic, we believe everyone can take on the world - no matter your age, gender, gender identity, gender expression, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disabilities, religion, or beliefs. We celebrate difference and everything that makes our colleagues unique by upholding an inclusive environment in which we can all thrive.

So that everyone at Virgin Atlantic can be themselves and know they belong. To make your journey with us accessible and individual to you, we encourage you to let us know if you’d like a little extra help with your application, or if you have any individual requirements at any stage along your recruitment journey. We are here to support you, so please reach out to our team, (recruitment@fly.virgin.com) feeling confident that we’ve got your individual considerations covered.