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Obviant is a defense tech company building the data source of truth and AI tooling for defense acquisition. The company fuses thousands of structured and unstructured sources into a coherent picture of budget, programs, and organizations, serving top-tier customers in the national security space.
You will own one engineering team end-to-end—either the data engineering team or the product/web application team, depending on your strengths. You'll inherit an existing team and help expand it as the company grows. This is a hands-on management role where you set the technical bar, run delivery cadence, grow engineers, and stay close enough to the code to earn their respect.
Key responsibilities include:
**Technical Leadership:** Set technical direction with senior engineers, guide design tradeoffs and architecture decisions, own engineering standards and quality bar, mentor the team to raise overall capability, and drop into tactical work when needed to unblock the team or land business-critical outcomes.
**People Growth:** Develop engineers with real growth plans and direct feedback on a regular cadence. Deliver hard feedback with candor and empathy, make difficult personnel decisions with care and clarity, hire and expand the team while maintaining standards, and manage up to keep leadership informed of risks and direction.
**Team Operations & Delivery:** Build culture before process; ownership and accountability solve more than rituals. Run honest retrospectives that close the loop with improvements that ship. Manage to meaningful health and delivery metrics without gaming them. Keep the team focused and healthy through priority shifts.
**Product & Business Alignment:** Partner closely with Product, Design, GtM (if leading product engineering) or analysts, AI/ML, data consumers (if leading data engineering). Translate business goals into clear engineering outcomes. Push back with conviction and openness to being wrong. Keep the team focused when priorities shift.
The company operates with high standards—customers make acquisition and investment decisions based on the data, so precision is non-negotiable. You'll work in a fast-moving, early-stage environment with high autonomy and accountability.
**Requirements:**
- 7+ years of engineering experience, including substantial time leading and growing engineering teams
- Real technical depth: ability to reason through system design, spot failure modes, and prioritize what to ship first
- Track record of owning team delivery: planning, estimation, reliable execution, holding the line on performance, scalability, and technical debt
- Direct experience with hard management: delivering difficult feedback that landed, diagnosing and working with struggling performers, running exits well
- Strong communication in all directions: push back on leadership, explain technical work to non-technical audiences, coach engineers, over-communicate proactively
- Comfortable with high autonomy and ambiguity in a fast-moving, early-stage environment; don't wait for direction
**Nice to have:**
- Experience building complex data or AI systems (large-scale ingestion, pipeline orchestration, schema evolution, entity resolution) or managing fast-moving web application teams
- Background in government, defense tech, or regulated environments
- Active TS/SCI clearance or eligibility to obtain one
- Experience owning platform-level infrastructure from initial design through scaling across multiple teams
