Senior Engineering Manager

Obviant has built the data source of truth and AI tooling for defense acquisition, fusing thousands of structured and unstructured sources into a coherent picture of budget, programs, and the organizations running them. We're hiring a Senior Engineering Manager to own one team end to end, either the data engineering team or the product/web application team. The role sets the technical bar, runs delivery cadence, grows engineers, and stays close enough to the code to earn their respect. It is not a coordination role.

Responsibilities

Set technical direction with senior engineers and guide the team through design tradeoffs, architecture decisions, and implementation quality; Own engineering standards and the quality bar, without becoming the bottleneck; Raise the bar of the whole team through mentoring, reviews, and a quality-first culture; Drop into a tactical role when it is the fastest way to unblock the team or land a business-critical outcome; Develop engineers through growth plans, direct feedback, and clear leveling conversations; Deliver hard feedback with candor and empathy, face to face; Diagnose underperformance early, coach honestly, and handle exits with dignity; Hire and expand the team as the company grows, holding the bar under pressure; Manage up and across, escalating early and keeping leadership and peers informed; Reach for culture before process, and keep rituals honest and useful; Run retros that close the loop; Manage to a small set of meaningful health and delivery metrics, guarding against gaming them; Partner with Product, Design, and GtM (for product engineering) or analysts, AI/ML, and data consumers (for data engineering); Translate mission and business goals into clear engineering outcomes; Keep the team focused and healthy when priorities shift

Requirements

7+ years of engineering experience, including substantial time leading and growing engineering teams; Real technical depth, able to reason through system design, spot failure modes, and say what to cut to ship first; A track record of owning delivery for a team, including planning, estimation, and reliable execution, and holding the line on performance, scalability, and technical debt; Direct experience with hard feedback, managing a struggling performer, and running an exit; Strong communication in every direction, including pushing back on leadership, explaining technical work to non-technical audiences, coaching engineers, and over-communicating; Comfortable with high autonomy and accountability in a fast-moving, early-stage environment, at home in ambiguity and not waiting for direction

Nice to have

Experience building complex data or AI systems at large scale, including ingestion, pipeline orchestration, schema evolution, entity resolution, or managing fast-moving web application teams; Background in government, defense tech, or another regulated environment; Active TS/SCI clearance, or eligibility to obtain one; Experience owning platform-level infrastructure from initial design through scaling it across multiple teams

Benefits

Flexible schedule; Work from home when needed; Sizeable equity; Flexible vacation time; Full health, dental, and vision insurance