Senior Engineering Manager

Obviant has built the data source of truth and the AI tooling for defense acquisition. The company fuses thousands of structured and unstructured sources into a coherent picture of budget, programs, and the organizations running them. The Senior Engineering Manager will own one team end to end, either the data engineering team or the product/web application team, inheriting an existing team and helping expand it. The role is not a coordination role: the manager sets the technical bar, runs the delivery cadence, grows engineers, and stays close enough to the code to earn their respect.

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; Raise the bar of the whole team through mentoring, reviews, and a culture where quality is the default; 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; Manage up and across, keeping leadership and peers ahead of what is coming; Reach for culture before process; Keep rituals honest, co-created with the team, and focused on estimation and predictability; Run retros that close the loop; Manage to a small set of meaningful health and delivery metrics; Partner with Product, Design, and GtM (product engineering) or analysts, AI/ML, and data consumers (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, demonstrated by reasoning through system design, spotting failure modes, and saying what to cut to ship first; A track record of owning delivery for a team, including planning, estimation, reliable execution, and holding the line on performance, scalability, and technical debt; Direct experience with the hard parts of management, such as delivering hard feedback, diagnosing and working with a struggling performer, and running a real exit well; 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

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; An 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, including time for personal matters and working from home when needed; Sizeable equity; Flexible vacation time; Full health, dental, and vision insurance