Director of Engineering – A&D

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Illinois.

📋 Description

• Lead and nurture engineering talent by recruiting, onboarding, mentoring, and developing software engineers throughout their career progression.

• Engage in architecture evaluations, guide technological selections, and establish the technical standards for Defense solutions.

• Review, analyze, and reason about production code.

• Ensure teams produce high-quality software at a manageable pace.

• Promote engineering excellence through continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), automated testing, observability, infrastructure as code, and secure-by-default design principles.

• Encourage the adoption of AI-assisted development practices across engineering teams.

• Empower engineers to create and validate AI-driven product features, including RAG, agentic architectures, and evaluation harnesses.

• Address cross-team dependencies and eliminate obstacles.

• Collaborate with Product Management, Design, Architecture, and senior leadership to synchronize technical implementation with product strategy.

• Engage directly with defense customers in technical conversations, workshops, and collaborative creation.

• Cultivate a culture of continuous learning, constructive debate, ownership, and specialized engineering expertise.

⛳️ Requirements

• Extensive experience in software engineering, with a demonstrated history of functioning at the Principal Engineer or Architect level.

• Proven track record in managing and developing engineering teams, including recruitment, performance management, and career progression.

• Strong practical experience in cloud-native architectures, microservices, API-first design, CI/CD, containerization, and infrastructure as code.

• Proficient in one or more modern programming languages, such as Go, Python, Java, C#, or TypeScript.

• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools.

• Understanding of AI/ML integration patterns, including RAG, agents, prompt engineering, and evaluation techniques.

• Proven ability to drive AI adoption within engineering teams.

• Experience leading teams responsible for development, testing, deployment, and production operations.

• Capability to convey technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and translate business and mission requirements into engineering directives.

• Must reside in the United States and meet eligibility criteria for U.S. defense work.

• Experience delivering software to defense, government, or other regulated customers is a plus.

• Experience in enterprise software or large-scale SaaS product development is an advantage.

• Experience building or leading teams that deliver AI-powered product features is beneficial.

• Familiarity with Aerospace & Defense organizations is a plus.

• Background in multiple engineering disciplines is advantageous.

• Experience with event-driven architectures, message brokers, and streaming platforms is advantageous.

• Proven record of modernizing legacy systems or migrating to cloud-native architectures is beneficial.

• Familiarity with security practices such as OWASP and threat modeling is a plus.

• Experience with organizational design is advantageous.

🏝️ Benefits

• Flexible paid time off, including sick leave and holidays.

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance.

• 401K plan with company contribution.

• Flexible spending accounts.

• Life insurance and disability benefits.

• Tuition assistance programs.

• Opportunities for community involvement and volunteering events.

• Flexible and hybrid work arrangements.