Head of Engineering, AI & Data Platform

Pay: $210,000.00 - $260,000.00 per year

Why This Is a Great Opportunity

• Take ownership of engineering at a fast-growing Series A technology company where your decisions will directly shape the platform, team, and technical strategy.
• Work at the intersection of software engineering, data architecture, AI, security, and mission-critical technology.
• Lead a talented multidisciplinary team spanning software development, data engineering, machine learning, analytics, and DevOps.
• Stay close to the technology while operating as a senior engineering leader, making meaningful architecture and platform decisions rather than simply managing from a distance.
• Build engineering processes, standards, and culture during a pivotal stage of company growth.
• Partner directly with executive leadership and product to influence company strategy, roadmap execution, and long-term scale.

Location: Washington, DC preferred with a flexible hybrid environment. Exceptional remote candidates may also be considered if they are comfortable traveling to Washington, DC regularly.

Note: Candidates must have 10+ years of progressive engineering experience, including at least 5+ years of hands-on software development, 3+ years of formal engineering people management experience. Strong hands-on technical credibility, experience owning architecture decisions, and modern AI development fluency are essential.

About Us

We are a fast-growing Series A technology company building AI-powered intelligence software that helps enterprise and public-sector organizations make faster, smarter security and risk decisions. Our team combines advanced data, AI, and software engineering to solve complex real-world challenges at scale. Confidential Employer.

Job Description

• Own the long-term data architecture and platform strategy as data volume, customers, and technical requirements scale.
• Make critical decisions across data pipelines, storage, modeling, databases, data warehousing, and ML/AI infrastructure.
• Establish engineering delivery discipline around roadmaps, sprint cadence, dependencies, releases, technical debt, and execution predictability.
• Partner closely with Product and business leadership to translate company priorities into reliable engineering delivery.
• Remain technically engaged through architecture reviews, code reviews, technical problem-solving, and key platform decisions.
• Establish and maintain high standards for testing, CI/CD, security, documentation, and software quality.
• Lead, mentor, hire, and develop engineers across software, data, ML, analytics, and DevOps functions.
• Build a high-trust engineering culture centered on ownership, accountability, speed, and strong technical judgment.
• Incorporate AI coding assistants, agents, and LLM-powered tools into engineering workflows to responsibly improve productivity.
• Help guide applied AI decisions involving model selection, evaluation, reliability, performance, and cost.
• Collaborate with security and compliance stakeholders to ensure systems are designed with appropriate governance and security controls.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of progressive engineering experience
• 5+ years of hands-on software development experience
• 3+ years of formal engineering people management
• Demonstrated experience designing and owning scalable data architecture.
• Strong hands-on software engineering and technical architecture background.
• Proven engineering program and delivery management experience.
• Experience hiring, mentoring, and developing high-performing engineers.
• Strong working knowledge of modern AI development tools, coding assistants, agents, and LLM-based systems.
• Experience building scalable engineering processes in a fast-moving environment.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to translate technical priorities into business terms.
• Startup experience strongly preferred, ideally within a Series A or Series B organization.
• Federal, defense, government technology, security, threat intelligence, geospatial, or OSINT experience is a plus.
• Prior government security clearance or clearance eligibility is a plus.

Why You Will Love Working Here

You will have the opportunity to build rather than inherit, combining executive-level influence with meaningful technical ownership. Our environment rewards strong judgment, thoughtful experimentation, low-ego collaboration, and people who enjoy turning ambiguity into scalable systems. This is an opportunity to shape an engineering organization, technical platform, and AI strategy while working on technology with significant real-world impact.

JPC-2365

Benefits:

• Health insurance
• Paid time off
• Retirement plan
• Vision insurance

Requirements: Candidates may reside anywhere, though DC is preferred. Must-have: 10+ years of progressive engineering experience. 5+ years of hands-on software development. 3+ years of formal engineering people management exp. Experience with AI development tooling. Must have Strong software/data architecture experience.

Submission Email / Name: must submit via the ATS [HERE]. Click on ‘Base Operations’ 

[email protected] 

• Click on ‘add’ on the top right and then ‘candidate’ to submit

• Also send to Haley and Cory: [email protected]

Quick Recruiter Reference

Series A AI/security technology company seeking a hands-on Head of Engineering to own software/data architecture, engineering delivery, AI-enabled development, and team leadership. Requires 10+ years progressive engineering/data architecture leadership and 3+ years formal people management.

Recruiters Submission: To submit, cancel - Head of Engineering - Base Operations / Traversal - JPC-2365 - source

New Job Order Alert

• Client job title: Head of Engineering

• Location: Washington, DC

• On-site, hybrid, remote: Hybrid

• Experience: 10

• Good fit job titles/keywords for candidates: Head of Engineering, VP Engineering, Director Engineering, Head of Platform Engineering, Head of Data Engineering, Data Architecture, AI/ML Platform

• # of hires needed: 1