Software Engineering Leadership

• Stay technical and hands-on where it matters — code review, architecture decisions, and unblocking hard technical problems, not just status reporting.
• Set and enforce engineering standards: code quality, testing, CI/CD, security practices, and technical documentation.
• Drive decisions on system architecture, tech stack evolution, and technical debt prioritization.

Team Leadership & People Management

• Manage, mentor, and grow a team of engineers, including hiring, performance management, and career development.
• Build a healthy engineering culture at a stage where the team is scaling quickly — clear ownership, high trust, low ego.
• Act as the connective tissue between individual contributors and company leadership, translating technical realities into business terms and vice versa.

AI Operations & Applied AI Fluency

• Bring native fluency in modern AI development workflows — using AI coding assistants, agentic tools, and LLM-based systems as a default part of how the team builds, not as a novelty.
• Identify where AI can responsibly accelerate engineering velocity (code generation, testing, internal tooling) and where it introduces risk that needs guardrails (especially given our federal customer base).
• Help define how Base Operations' own product uses AI under the hood — model selection, evaluation, reliability, and cost tradeoffs — in close partnership with product and applied data science talent.

What We're Looking For

• 10+ years of progressive experience spanning software engineering, data architecture, and engineering management, with at least 3 years in a formal people-leadership role (Engineering Manager, Director, or equivalent).
• Demonstrated experience owning data architecture decisions at scale — not just using data infrastructure, but designing it.
• Strong program/delivery management instincts — comfortable owning timelines, measuring level of effort and cross-functional coordination with Eng & Product leads.
• A genuine builder background — enough recent hands-on engineering experience to earn technical credibility with your team and make real architectural and development decisions.
• Proven ability to hire, manage, and grow engineers, with a track record of building functional, high velocity teams.
• Native fluency with modern AI tools — daily use of AI coding assistants/agents in your own workflow, and a point of view on how AI changes engineering org design, hiring, and velocity.
• Comfort operating in a dual-use environment — security-conscious by default, and willing to learn the federal compliance landscape (FedRAMP, CMMC, CUI handling) as it applies to engineering.
• Startup experience, ideally at Series A–B stage, where ambiguity is normal and the team is still being built.

Nice to Have

• Prior experience at a company serving both commercial and federal/defense customers.
• Experience with threat intelligence, geospatial/OSINT data, or security-adjacent platforms.
• Existing or prior eligibility for a U.S. government security clearance.
• Experience standing up engineering processes from scratch at an early-stage company (not just operating within an existing one).

Logistics

• Location: Washington, DC preferred (hybrid); will consider strong remote candidates with regular DC travel.
• Reports to: CEO
• Team: Oversee team of Developers, Data Analysts, ML Engineers, Data Engineers, DevOps
• Travel: Occasional, primarily for team offsites and senior leadership engagements