Director of Engineering - A&D

Description

The company's Aerospace & Defense unit serves airlines, maintenance providers, equipment makers and defense operators. Its software keeps complex fleets and platforms ready for missions, covering maintenance, asset and service work across the full lifecycle at scale.

The company is rebuilding how this software is made and delivered around AI, and it is hiring engineering leaders to apply AI both inside its products and in its own development work.

This director role leads the engineering teams that build software for U.S. defense operators.

The job is engineer first and people manager second, and it requires both. You work as a player-coach: you bring Principal Engineer or Architect depth, shape architecture, set the technical standard, and are directly accountable for hiring, growing and keeping your engineers.

Teams own their work end to end, from design through development, testing, deployment and operations, under a build-it, run-it approach. Your task is to give them clarity, context and the right conditions in a domain where reliability, security and compliance are mandatory. You stay hands-on by joining design reviews, weighing architecture trade-offs, helping with hard technical problems, and using the same practices and AI tools as your teams.

AI fluency is central. You will drive AI adoption across the teams, both in AI-assisted development and in AI-powered product features, including where data handling and deployment are tightly restricted. The goal is practical, everyday use of AI.

This role is not for managers who have stopped writing code.

The company has billion-dollar revenue and 7,000+ employees on all continents.

Responsibilities

• Hire, onboard, coach and grow software engineers at every level, from associate to senior lead. Your results are measured by how your teams grow and what they deliver.
• Set technical direction for the Defense solutions portfolio. Join architecture reviews, guide technology decisions and keep the technical bar high. Read, review and reason about production code so engineers trust your judgment.
• Make sure teams ship high-quality software at a pace they can sustain, weighing technical quality against business and mission value.
• Push engineering practice forward: CI/CD, automated testing, observability, infrastructure as code and secure-by-default design, including supply chain security, hardening and the accreditation expectations of defense customers.
• Lead AI adoption in development. Make sure engineers can build and validate AI features such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agentic designs and evaluation harnesses, and build a practical culture with sensible safeguards.
• Clear blockers: resolve cross-team dependencies, protect teams from distractions and keep engineers focused on what matters most.
• Work with Product Management, Design, Architecture and senior leadership to tie engineering work to product strategy. Speak directly with defense customers in technical discussions, workshops and co-creation sessions.
• Build the culture: encourage learning, productive debate and ownership. Help engineers develop depth in areas such as front-end, back-end, data engineering, applied AI, platform and SRE, and security.

Requirements

• Significant software engineering experience, including a record of working at Principal Engineer or Architect level on system design, cross-team architecture and technology strategy.
• Proven experience managing and developing engineering teams, covering hiring, performance management and career development, with a coaching approach.
• Strong hands-on background in cloud-native architecture, microservices, API-first design, CI/CD, containers and infrastructure as code, plus skill in one or more modern languages such as Go, Python, Java, C or TypeScript.
• Hands-on use of AI-assisted development tools, understanding of AI/ML integration patterns (RAG, agents, prompt engineering, evaluation), and a record of driving AI adoption in engineering teams.
• Experience leading teams that own development, testing, deployment and production operations.
• Ability to explain technical ideas to non-technical stakeholders and turn business and mission needs into engineering direction.
• Experience delivering software to defense, government or other regulated customers, including security accreditation, restricted or disconnected networks and controlled-data handling.
• Experience in enterprise software or SaaS product development at scale.
• Experience building or leading teams that ship AI-powered product capabilities, such as MLOps pipelines, AI safety and governance practices, or AI evaluation frameworks.
• Experience working with Aerospace & Defense organizations or on asset, maintenance, MRO or fleet-readiness solutions.
• Background across several engineering disciplines, such as front-end and back-end, or platform and application development.
• Experience with event-driven architectures, message brokers and streaming platforms.
• Record of modernizing legacy systems or moving them to cloud-native architectures.
• Familiarity with security practices such as OWASP, threat modeling and security tooling in CI/CD.
• Experience with organizational design, including team structures, team topologies and scaling engineering organizations.
• Technically deep, and motivated to multiply the impact of others rather than only your own.
• Lead with context rather than control: set direction and trust teams to execute.
• Comfortable with healthy tension and debate, aiming for better decisions over comfortable meetings.
• Use AI tools in your own work and enjoy helping others do the same.
• Stay curious and expect the same from your teams.
• Persistent: work through ambiguity, remove blockers and keep teams moving.
• Eligible to work in the United States and to meet the eligibility requirements for U.S. defense work for this requisition.

Conditions

Hybrid working options are available so you can choose the setup that suits you.

Based in the United States and eligible for U.S. defense work for this requisition.

The company is a Drug-Free Workplace.

The company is an equal opportunity federal contractor that welcomes women, men, disabled people and veterans.

Benefits

• Flexible paid time off, including sick and holiday leave.
• Health cover for medical, dental and vision care.
• 401(k) with company contribution.
• Flexible spending accounts.
• Life insurance plus disability cover.
• Tuition assistance.
• Chances to take part in community volunteering events.