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Vannevar Labs is a defense technology company building agentic AI systems to support national security decision-making. The company has grown from $3M to $80M ARR in three years and achieved unicorn status, with AI systems actively deployed in Indo-Pacific operations.
You will lead the AI Platform organization, which comprises two integrated areas: (1) Machine Learning platform—standard pipelines and shared services for reliable, scalable data and model enrichments; and (2) Agents platform—the runtime foundation for building and operating agents with focus on durable execution, observability, evaluation, and safe operation at scale.
Key responsibilities include:
- Setting technical direction, operating model, and roadmap for enrichments and agents platform teams
- Building the enrichments foundation with standard pipelines and shared services for reliable, efficient data and model enrichments
- Scaling the agents runtime with durable execution capabilities including orchestration, state management, reliability, observability, and quality controls
- Defining platform standards, interfaces, and reusable primitives that enable product teams to build AI-enabled capabilities
- Establishing measurement, testing, and evaluation practices to improve correctness, safety, and usefulness of agent behavior in production
- Partnering cross-functionally with Product, Design, Mission, Security, and Infrastructure teams
- Making pragmatic decisions balancing velocity, reliability, and operational risk for AI systems supporting real-world missions
- Recruiting, mentoring, and developing engineers and engineering leaders
Required qualifications: 3+ years as an engineering manager with demonstrated ability to lead and build software teams; 5+ years hands-on machine learning experience and 2+ years building agentic AI systems in production; experience building or operating platforms used by multiple internal teams; deep familiarity with AI/ML systems in production including orchestration, evaluation, observability, quality, reliability, and cost; experience leading teams building workflow, data, ML, or service platforms with high operational standards; ability to lead through ambiguity while balancing speed, reliability, security, and mission impact.
