The posting
Vannevar builds AI systems for the Department of War's most consequential missions. We have 125 deployments across every branch and combatant command spanning our core platform and five distinct products. An an example of how we work, when major combat operations started with Iran, we fielded a new product supporting 24/7 operations and 9,000+ users in three months.
How we build is our advantage: we deploy forward with the people who own the mission. Our engineers, product team, and CTO deploy forward to the point of friction, including visiting units in Ukraine. We focus on embedding directly with operational units supporting great power competition with China, combat operations with Iran, and counter-narcotics missions.
About the role
Vannevar is entering its next stage: scaling from early mission wins into an AI-native, non-traditional defense technology prime. Getting there means more than growing headcount — it means building new operating systems for how our people work, establishing processes that repeat reliably across accounts, and rethinking engineering delivery from first principles for this next phase of growth.
Vannevar’s Mission teams work directly with national security customers, pairing small-team focus with a shared technology platform. As an Enterprise Technical Lead, you’ll own technical direction and engineering delivery for a portfolio of accounts (representing $10M–$50M in contract value) — organized around a service branch, combatant command, or emerging new mission area.
You’ll guide work across the full customer lifecycle: discovering mission needs, shaping opportunities, testing concepts, and scaling capabilities into sustained operations. Using Vannevar’s Agent Control Plane — shared infrastructure for deploying AI solutions in national security environments — you and your team will prototype and test capabilities in areas like digital sensing, logistics, supply chain security, and defense health, then assess what’s ready to scale or transition to dedicated product teams.
You’ll start as a hands-on technical leader on new accounts, learning the stack through direct engineering work — making architecture decisions, contributing to implementation, and coaching engineers. As your portfolio grows, you’ll build and lead the team behind it, while staying accountable for architecture and delivery.
What you’ll do
Technical leadership & delivery
- Set technical strategy across your portfolio, turning mission priorities into architectures, plans, and deployed capabilities
- Decide when to configure existing platform tools, build reusable extensions, or write mission-specific software — and push back on commitments that aren’t securely or sustainably deliverable
- Manage engineering capacity and priorities across accounts — so commitments never outrun the people available to deliver them
Customer & opportunity work
- Work directly with customers and end users to understand mission needs and constraints — so what you build matches how the mission actually operates, not just how it looks from a requirements document
- Master each customer’s network topology, enterprise architecture, and mission applications — so you extend what already works instead of building a parallel silo, and design solutions that can mature into a Program of Record
- Shape new opportunities with customer success, BD, legal, and contracting — contributing technical content to ROMs and SOWs
- Build and validate prototypes with customers and product teams; guide what’s working toward production, scale, and eventual transition to dedicated product teams
Platform contribution
- Feed recurring engineering challenges and reusable patterns into quarterly Platform/Product planning — so the platform evolves from what’s actually breaking in the field, not top-down roadmap guesses
- Enable FDEs to build improvements directly into the platform from the field — so fixes ship at the speed problems are found, instead of waiting on a centralized release cycle
Execution & governance
- Produce architecture artifacts (system context, component, interface, data-flow, deployment diagrams — UML/SysML where useful) and track work in tools like Jira and Notion — so decisions are traceable and a team can pick up the work without you in the room
- Guide teams through security, compliance, and authorization requirements, coordinating with customer security stakeholders — so systems clear ATO and deploy on schedule instead of stalling in review
People
- Mentor engineers and technical leads; as the role grows, take on performance feedback, reviews, and development planning — so the team can take on more of the portfolio without you as the bottleneck
Travel
- Up to 20%, for customer discovery and delivery support
Locations
This role requires regular in-person engagement with customers and engineers; location will align with the portfolio you lead.
- Washington, DC
- San Diego, CA
- Norfolk, VA
What You'll Bring
- 5+ years hands-on full-stack engineering, able to contribute directly to architecture, code, integrations, and deployment
- Experience leading technical delivery on $5M+ enterprise accounts
- A track record of taking software from pilot/R&D into enterprise use, including scaling and ongoing support
- Experience building in government or similarly regulated environments, including familiarity with DoD RMF and NIST SP 800-53
- Experience working with government IT/program offices on requirements, architecture, and integrations
- Experience integrating with government systems — data platforms, IAM, SIEMs, cross-domain solutions
- Strong hands-on experience building production software in Python and/or TypeScript/Node.js, including backend services, APIs, and modern web applications using React or a comparable framework
- Experience deploying and operating containerized applications using Docker and Kubernetes in AWS or comparable environments, with working knowledge of relational databases, search, object storage, and caching systems such as Postgres, Elasticsearch, S3, and Redis
- Strong cross-functional communication, spanning technical, customer, product, and business stakeholders
- Active U.S. Top Secret clearance with SCI eligibility
Especially Valuable
- Experience building and deploying LLM-powered applications or agents, including tool and data integrations, model context providers, evaluation, observability, and reliability
- Experience with DoD Cloud Computing SRG impact levels (IL2/IL4/IL5/IL6)
What we offer
Competitive Salary
The salary range for this position is $150,000 - $215,000 + equity + 401K match. Within the range, individual pay is determined by experience, relevant education, and/or training.
Comprehensive Benefits
We’re proud to offer competitive benefits that support our employees. Some key highlights of our benefits package include:
- Health, dental, and vision insurance
- 100% remote first culture. You can work from anywhere in the US and all full time employees have WeWork access
- Unlimited PTO including competitive vacation and holiday schedules
- Lifestyle stipends - Monthly mental health, wellness & fitness stipend, in-home office setup stipend and family planning assistance
- Salary top-up during military reserve duty
- Fully paid parental leave
- Child and pet care reimbursement during travel
Vannevar is an equal opportunity employer, and qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, or disability status.
We encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply, even if you don't feel like you're a perfect fit. If you're passionate about contributing to our mission, we'd love to hear from you!
IMPORTANT NOTICE We are committed to protecting the privacy of all applicants. Official emails from the company will come from an @vannevarlabs.com domain. Under no circumstances will a legitimate representative from our company contact you to request passwords, financial information, or other sensitive personal data. Please be vigilant of potential scams.
