Engineering Manager, Mission Agents

Role Description

Vannevar is building the future of national security enablement with agentic AI. Our platform tightens the loop from observation to action by giving warfighters cutting-edge analysis tools to make better decisions, faster.

We’re looking for a talented Software Engineering Manager to lead our Mission Agents engineering team. This team builds the agent-powered mission console, product surfaces, and workflow infrastructure that enable mission owners in the defense and national security space to leverage AI agents to drive real operational outcomes.

Your team will partner closely with customers, mission owners, designers, product leaders, and engineers to build lasting products where users are meaningfully enabled by AI. You’ll be responsible for leading the team that designs, ships, and scales full-stack agentic workflows.

This role is ideal for a product-minded engineering leader who can combine strong management fundamentals with deep technical judgment around AI-native product development. You’ll help the team move quickly, iterate with users, and build pragmatic, high-impact agentic systems for national security missions.

What You’ll Do

• Product engineering: Lead the Mission Agents team in designing, building, and shipping a cutting-edge agent-powered mission console using TypeScript, React, Tailwind, Node.js, Python, Postgres, and AWS.
• Agent leadership: Guide the implementation and scaling of robust agentic workflows that enable missions at scale, using modern agent frameworks and patterns.
• 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.
• AI-native product strategy: Help define and shape how users are enabled by AI and agents at Vannevar, balancing ambitious product vision with reliable execution.
• 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, agentic software.

Qualifications

• 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.
• Familiarity with agentic AI products and workflows, including frameworks such as LangGraph, Agno, Pydantic AI, or similar 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.
• PostgreSQL, or other relational databases.
• Software development in AWS or other cloud services.
• Willingness to travel to offsites, 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.

Benefits

• 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.