Engineering Manager, Decision Advantage
vannevarlabs • Remote
Posted: July 13, 2026
Job Description
About the role
Vannevar builds new defense capabilities for 21st-century conflict. Our software delivers information dominance and decision advantage—improving targeting, accelerating planning, and strengthening both homeland defense and Indo-Pacific deterrence.
We’re looking for a talented Software Engineering Manager to lead our Decision Advantage engineering team. This team builds mission-critical intelligence and decision support capabilities to help our partners maintain strategic advantage.
Your team will partner closely with customers, mission owners, designers, product leaders, and engineers to build lasting products enabling a wide range of capabilities, including analysis of the information environment, perception assessment and management capabilities, hyper-localized sentiment analysis, and tracking strategic indicators and warnings.
This role is ideal for a product-minded engineering leader who can combine strong management fundamentals with deep technical judgment. You’ll help the team move quickly, iterate with users, and build pragmatic, high-impact products for national security missions.
What you’ll do
- Product engineering: Lead the Decision Advantage team in designing, building, and shipping cutting-edge applications, services, and agents using TypeScript, React, Tailwind, Node.js, Python, Postgres, and AWS.
- Customer and mission partnership: Partner with customers, mission owners, designers, and product teams to understand user workflows and drive concrete outcomes aligned with real-world operator workflows.
- Developer and team acceleration: Reduce friction and duplication across the team by building strong technical patterns, reusable services, and clear product engineering practices.
- Team leadership: Grow and mentor a high-performing team of full-stack engineers. Foster a strong engineering culture focused on pragmatism, velocity, ownership, and mission impact.
- Cross-functional execution: Collaborate with Design, Platform, and Product teams to deliver durable, reliable software.
What we look for
- 3+ years of experience leading and building software engineering teams, ideally in product engineering, AI/ML, or related domains.
- 8+ years of professional software development experience, with strong technical judgment across full-stack systems.
- Strong product instincts and prior experience working directly with users, customers, or mission owners to understand workflows, collect feedback, and ship better solutions.
- Ability to lead teams through ambiguity, balancing speed, reliability, security, and mission impact.
- Track record of data-driven decision making - argue with metrics, not gut feelings.
- Excellent communication skills, cross-functional leadership, and project ownership.
- Proficiency with:
- Coding in Python, TypeScript, or similar
- Postgres, or other relational databases.
- Software development in AWS or other cloud services.
- Willingness to travel to off-sites, team syncs, and customer sites.
- U.S. Citizenship, required to access U.S.-only data systems.
Nice to have
- Active security clearance or ability/willingness to obtain one.
- Prior experience building software for defense, national security, or intelligence use cases.
Competitive Salary
The salary range for this position is $200,000 - $260,000 + equity. Within the range, individual pay is determined by experience, relevant education, and/or training.
What We Offer
- Health, dental, and vision insurance
- Remote friendly with WeWork access
- Unlimited PTO, shared downtime during the federal holiday calendar, and company-wide off time at the end of each year
- 401(k) match
- Lifestyle & wellbeing stipends
- Salary top-up during military reserve duty
- Fully paid parental leave
- Child and pet care reimbursement during travel
Additional Content
About the role
Vannevar builds new defense capabilities for 21st-century conflict. Our software delivers information dominance and decision advantage—improving targeting, accelerating planning, and strengthening both homeland defense and Indo-Pacific deterrence.
We’re looking for a talented Software Engineering Manager to lead our Decision Advantage engineering team. This team builds mission-critical intelligence and decision support capabilities to help our partners maintain strategic advantage.
Your team will partner closely with customers, mission owners, designers, product leaders, and engineers to build lasting products enabling a wide range of capabilities, including analysis of the information environment, perception assessment and management capabilities, hyper-localized sentiment analysis, and tracking strategic indicators and warnings.
This role is ideal for a product-minded engineering leader who can combine strong management fundamentals with deep technical judgment. You’ll help the team move quickly, iterate with users, and build pragmatic, high-impact products for national security missions.
What you’ll do
- Product engineering: Lead the Decision Advantage team in designing, building, and shipping cutting-edge applications, services, and agents using TypeScript, React, Tailwind, Node.js, Python, Postgres, and AWS.
- Customer and mission partnership: Partner with customers, mission owners, designers, and product teams to understand user workflows and drive concrete outcomes aligned with real-world operator workflows.
- Developer and team acceleration: Reduce friction and duplication across the team by building strong technical patterns, reusable services, and clear product engineering practices.
- Team leadership: Grow and mentor a high-performing team of full-stack engineers. Foster a strong engineering culture focused on pragmatism, velocity, ownership, and mission impact.
- Cross-functional execution: Collaborate with Design, Platform, and Product teams to deliver durable, reliable software.
What we look for
- 3+ years of experience leading and building software engineering teams, ideally in product engineering, AI/ML, or related domains.
- 8+ years of professional software development experience, with strong technical judgment across full-stack systems.
- Strong product instincts and prior experience working directly with users, customers, or mission owners to understand workflows, collect feedback, and ship better solutions.
- Ability to lead teams through ambiguity, balancing speed, reliability, security, and mission impact.
- Track record of data-driven decision making - argue with metrics, not gut feelings.
- Excellent communication skills, cross-functional leadership, and project ownership.
- Proficiency with:
- Coding in Python, TypeScript, or similar
- Postgres, or other relational databases.
- Software development in AWS or other cloud services.
- Willingness to travel to off-sites, team syncs, and customer sites.
- U.S. Citizenship, required to access U.S.-only data systems.
Nice to have
- Active security clearance or ability/willingness to obtain one.
- Prior experience building software for defense, national security, or intelligence use cases.
Competitive Salary
The salary range for this position is $200,000 - $260,000 + equity. Within the range, individual pay is determined by experience, relevant education, and/or training.
What We Offer
- Health, dental, and vision insurance
- Remote friendly with WeWork access
- Unlimited PTO, shared downtime during the federal holiday calendar, and company-wide off time at the end of each year
- 401(k) match
- Lifestyle & wellbeing stipends
- Salary top-up during military reserve duty
- Fully paid parental leave
- Child and pet care reimbursement during travel