Senior Engineering Manager

Develop engineers deliberately: real growth plans, direct feedback on a real cadence, and clear leveling conversations

Keep it all in the open. Deliver hard feedback with candor and empathy, face to face, never through backchannels

Make the hard calls with care and spine diagnose underperformance early, coach honestly, and handle exits with dignity for the person and clarity for the team

Hire and expand the team as we grow, holding the bar under pressure to fill seats

Manage up as well as down. Keep leadership and your peers ahead of what's coming, escalate early, and make sure nobody is ever caught off guard by your team's direction or risks

Reach for culture before process. Ownership, high accountability, and zero excuses solve more than any ritual will add process only where culture alone can't carry the weight

Keep the rituals you do have honest: co-create them with the team, cut what's theater, and improve estimation and predictability over time

Run retros that close the loop improvements that ship and stick, not a list nobody revisits

Manage to a small set of meaningful health and delivery metrics, and guard against gaming them (velocity is a diagnostic, never a target)

Partner with whoever sits closest to the customer for your team Product, Design, and GtM if you're leading product engineering; analysts, AI/ML, and data consumers if you're leading data engineering. The partners shift; the customer obsession doesn't

Translate mission and business goals into clear engineering outcomes, and be able to explain to anyone how your team's work moves the business

Push back with conviction, clarity, and a willingness to have your mind changed

Keep the team focused and healthy when priorities shift, without becoming a silo

7+ years of engineering experience, including substantial time leading and growing engineering teams

Real technical depth you can still demonstrate you can reason through a system design, spot the failure modes, and say what you'd cut to ship first

A track record of owning delivery for a team: planning, estimation, and reliable execution, including holding the line on performance, scalability, and technical debt

Direct experience with the hard parts of management hard feedback that landed, a struggling performer you diagnosed and worked, a real exit you ran well

Strong communication in every direction. You can push back on leadership, explain technical work to a non-technical audience, coach engineers, and over communicate before anyone has to ask

Comfortable with high autonomy and accountability in a fast-moving, early-stage environment. You're at home in ambiguity and you don't wait for direction

Strong references from current and prior roles

Experience building complex data or AI systems large-scale 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

Four traits show up in everything we do, and we'll probe for all four when we talk:

Bias for action : you move decisively with incomplete information. Action is the best medicine

Strong opinions, loosely held : you argue a clear point of view, then update quickly when the evidence changes. Intellectual honesty over ego

Continuous improvement : you measure how your team works, run real feedback loops, and close them

People growth : you develop engineers, give direct feedback, and handle the hard calls with both care and spine

We live these every day. If they don't sound like you, this won't be a fit and we'd both rather know now.

Impact. Our work matters. We take a lot of pride in building to advance mission outcomes.

Overdeliver. We go above and beyond in everything we do - creating products and serving our users

Hustle. We get stuff done, no matter what it takes.

Empathy. Our users’ problems are our own. We don't push products, we solve problems.

Humility. We’re not afraid to admit what we don’t know. Our job is to listen and grow.

Integrity. Transparency & respect above all else. It’s non-negotiable, even when it isn't easy

We run a full loop for a hire this Senior Engineering Manager starting with a hiring manager call, remote technical and leadership rounds, and an on-site that includes time with our CEO, so you meet your boss's boss before you decide. We commit to three weeks or less from the first interview to the final decision.

To apply, visit obviant.com/careers

Obviant is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran.