Senior Director of Engineering

Description
The Role

We are seeking a Senior Director of Engineering to provide technical direction, leadership, and mentorship for the engineering team behind WarDrive, a general-purpose data engineering platform that acquires, fuses, models, and delivers data for U.S. Department of Defense and Intelligence Community customers. In this senior role, you will be the technical champion for the team. You will set architecture and engineering standards, lead sprint planning, Scrum, and Agile development, and grow the engineers and data scientists who work with you.

The platform's hardest problems shape the work. Data has to reach customers across security fabrics, from IL5 environments to classified SIPR and JWICS networks, each with its own delivery constraints. Sources that disagree have to be fused with defensible statistical confidence. Rich entities and fast-moving observations have to be modeled so the downstream systems stay fast. You will work closely with product leadership, customers, and executive leadership to turn mission requirements into production systems. This is a remote position open only to U.S. citizens living inside the United States, and candidates must be located in the Greater Washington, DC area.

What Success Looks Like

Within the first six months, you will have assessed the current engineering organization, platform architecture, and delivery practices, including data acquisition, cross-domain delivery, fusion, and persistence. You will have put a consistent Agile cadence in place, with sprint planning, backlog refinement, and retrospectives that the team trusts. You will have documented the core engineering principles the team designs by, set clear standards for code quality, testing, and deployment, started regular one-on-one mentorship with each engineer, and become the recognized technical authority for the team with product leadership and customers.

By twelve months, you will have a predictable delivery record across multiple concurrent programs, a defined technical roadmap for the platform, and a clear growth path for every engineer on the team. You will have made measurable gains in deployment reliability, latency visibility, and cloud cost efficiency, and put a decision framework in place for how AI and LLM capabilities reach platform data. You will be a trusted partner to the executive team on engineering strategy and hiring.

Responsibilities

Set the technical direction for the engineering organization across data acquisition, multi-source fusion, data modeling, persistence, and delivery.
Act as the technical champion for the team, leading sprint planning, Scrum ceremonies, and Agile development practices, and holding the team to predictable, high-quality delivery.
Lead, mentor, and develop engineers, data engineers, and data scientists through regular coaching, code and design reviews, and clear career paths.
Recruit, hire, and onboard engineering talent, and build a team culture of ownership and technical excellence.
Partner with product leadership to translate customer and mission requirements into roadmaps, technical designs, and delivery milestones, conforming the platform to customer constraints instead of imposing one-size-fits-all integrations.
Own the architecture for delivery across security fabrics, including low-latency streaming to IL5 environments and push-based, guard-constrained delivery to classified networks through cross-domain solutions.
Guide the design of probabilistic multi-source fusion and geo-temporal analytics, so that entity linkages carry a defensible confidence and their assumptions are stated and reviewed.
Drive data modeling and ontology design that breaks complex entities into simple, key-linked objects, tuned for downstream platforms such as Palantir Foundry.
Establish DevSecOps practices, including automated testing in CI/CD pipelines, containerized deployments, and infrastructure as code for repeatable deployments on customer networks.
Oversee petabyte-scale pipelines and analytics tooling, from statistical analysis to machine learning models, along with observability that measures latency by segment and tracks capability metrics.
Manage cloud and infrastructure spend, and drive architecture decisions that reduce cost while maintaining performance and reliability.
Decide how knowledge models and AI or LLM access to platform data are built, hosted, and consumed, weighing the cost of each option.
Serve as a senior technical voice in customer briefings, program reviews, and executive decision-making, and support pre-sales work such as technical solution development, RFI/RFP responses, and customer demonstrations.
Manage engineering schedules, budgets, risks, and capacity across multiple concurrent programs.
Ensure all engineering deliverables meet DoD and Intelligence Community security, compliance, and operational requirements, including classified, hybrid, and air-gapped environments.

Expertise

10+ years of experience in data analysis, data engineering, and data science, with a progressive record of technical leadership.
Master's or PhD in Computer Science or a closely related technical field.
Demonstrated experience leading teams of data scientists and data engineers, including hiring, mentoring, and performance management.
Hands-on command of Scrum and Agile practice: running sprint planning, backlog prioritization, and retrospectives, and coaching teams to deliver predictably.
Experience designing and operating large-scale streaming and batch data pipelines on cloud-native platforms (for example AWS, Databricks, and Spark) in distributed data environments.
Experience with geospatial and spatiotemporal analytics, including spatial databases such as PostgreSQL with PostGIS, and with statistical or machine learning methods for correlating observations across sources.
Strong data modeling skills, including entity and relationship design and decomposing complex objects into simple, linked ones.
Strong DevSecOps background, including CI/CD with test automation, containerization, and infrastructure as code.
Experience delivering software to U.S. government, defense, or intelligence customers, including deployment on customer-managed, classified, and cross-domain environments.
Ability to explain complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders, including customers and executives.

Certifications

Required:

Active TS//SCI security clearance eligibility.
U.S. citizenship and residence inside the United States.

Nice to Have:

Scrum or Agile certification (for example CSM, PSM, or SAFe).
Cloud or data platform certifications (for example AWS or Databricks).
Experience with Palantir Foundry or other ontology-driven platforms.
Familiarity with knowledge graphs, RDF and OWL, or exposing data to LLMs through interfaces such as MCP servers.
Experience reducing cloud provider costs on large data platforms.