{"id":3474344,"url":"https://alion.io/job/copperleaf-director-of-engineering-ad","title":"Director of Engineering - A&D","company":{"id":58114,"name":"Copperleaf","domain":"copperleaf.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/copperleaf","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":null,"truth_index":null},"role":"Leadership","role_family":"Leadership","seniority":"head","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"posting_text","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":{"min":180000,"max":210000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":210000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"C#","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Evaluation","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"Prompt Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"OWASP","optional":true},{"name":"Threat Modeling","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-29T18:19:55Z","employer_posted_date":null,"last_verified_at":"2026-10-29T18:19:55Z","board_verified":false,"closed_at":null,"days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"not_scored","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":0},"description":"This a Full Remote job, the offer is available from: United States\nCompany Description\nIFS is a billion-dollar revenue company with 7000+ employees on all continents. Our leading AI technology is the backbone of our award-winning enterprise software solutions, enabling our customers to be their best when it really matters-at the Moment of Service™. Our commitment to internal AI adoption has allowed us to stay at the forefront of technological advancements, ensuring our colleagues can unlock their creativity and productivity, and our solutions are always cutting-edge.\nAt IFS, we’re flexible, we’re innovative, and we’re focused not only on how we can engage with our customers but also on how we can make a real change and have a worldwide impact. We help solve some of society’s greatest challenges, fostering a better future through our agility, collaboration, and trust.\nWe celebrate diversity and understand our responsibility to reflect the diverse world we work in. We are committed to promoting an inclusive workforce that fully represents the many different cultures, backgrounds, and viewpoints of our customers, our partners, and our communities. As a truly international company serving people from around the globe, we realize that our success is tantamount to the respect we have for those different points of view.\nBy joining our team, you will have the opportunity to be part of a global, diverse environment; you will be joining a winning team with a \ncommitment to sustainability;\n and a company where we get things done so that you can make a positive impact on the world.\nWe’re looking for innovative and original thinkers to work in an environment where you can #MakeYourMoment so that we can help others make theirs. With the power of our AI-driven solutions, we empower our team to change the status quo and make a real difference.\nIf you want to change the status quo, we’ll help you make your moment. Join Team Purple. Join IFS.\nJob Description\nAbout our Aerospace & Defense business\nOur Aerospace & Defense business helps the world’s leading airlines, MROs, OEMs and defense operators keep complex fleets and platforms mission-ready - managing the full maintenance, asset and service lifecycle at scale. We are reimagining how that software is built and delivered around AI, and we are investing in engineering leaders who can put AI to work both inside our products and in how we build them.\nAbout the role\nAs Director of Engineering for our Defense solutions, you lead the engineering teams that build software for the U.S. defense operators who keep their fleets and platforms mission-ready. You are an engineer first and a people manager second, and we mean both halves. This is a player-coach role: you carry the technical depth of a Principal Engineer or Architect, you guide architectural decisions and set the technical bar, and you take direct responsibility for hiring, developing and retaining the engineers on your teams.\nYour teams are autonomous and own the full delivery lifecycle - design, development, testing, deployment and operations - with a you-build-it, you-run-it mindset. You make sure they have the clarity, context and conditions to deliver great work, in a domain where reliability, security and compliance are not optional. You stay close to the work: you join design reviews, weigh architectural trade-offs, unblock hard technical problems, and use the same engineering practices and AI tools your teams use every day.\nAI fluency is central. You will drive AI adoption across your teams, from AI-assisted development workflows that accelerate delivery to AI-powered product capabilities that create customer value. This is not about hype. It is about making AI a practical, embedded part of how your teams work and what they ship, including in environments with strict data-handling and deployment constraints.\nThis is not a role for managers who have left the code behind.\nWhat you’ll do\nLead and grow engineers. Hire, onboard, coach and develop software engineers across the full career ladder, from associate through senior lead. You measure your success by the growth and output of your teams.\n\nBe the technical leader. Participate in architecture reviews, guide technology choices, and set the technical bar for the Defense solutions portfolio. You can read, review and reason about production code, and your engineers trust your judgment because you have earned it.\n\nOwn delivery outcomes. Ensure your teams deliver high-quality software at a sustainable pace, balancing technical quality with business and mission value.\n\nDrive engineering excellence. Ensure teams follow modern practices: CI/CD, automated testing, observability, infrastructure as code and secure-by-default design, including the supply chain, hardening and accreditation expectations of defense customers.\n\nChampion AI fluency. Drive adoption of AI-assisted development across your teams. Make sure your engineers can build and validate AI-powered product features, from retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agentic architectures to evaluation harnesses, and foster a culture where AI is a practical tool with responsible guardrails.\n\nRemove obstacles. Resolve cross-team dependencies, shield teams from organizational noise, and keep engineers focused on what matters.\n\nPartner across the business. Work closely with Product Management, Design, Architecture and senior leadership to align technical execution with product strategy, and engage directly with defense customers in technical discussions, workshops and co-creation.\n\nShape engineering culture. Foster continuous learning, healthy debate and ownership. Help engineers find and grow deep specialisms such as front-end, back-end, data engineering, applied AI, platform and SRE, and security.\n\nWhat you’ll bring\nEssential\nTechnical depth: significant experience in software engineering, with a track record of operating at Principal Engineer or Architect level - system design, cross-team architectural thinking and technology strategy.\n\nPeople leadership: proven experience managing and developing engineering teams, including hiring, performance management and career development, with a coaching mindset.\n\nModern engineering foundations: strong hands-on background in cloud-native architectures, microservices, API-first design, CI/CD, containerization and infrastructure as code, and proficiency in one or more modern languages (e.g., Go, Python, Java, C#, TypeScript).\n\nAI fluency: hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools, an understanding of AI/ML integration patterns (RAG, agents, prompt engineering, evaluation), and a track record of driving AI adoption within engineering teams.\n\nFull-lifecycle ownership: experience leading teams that own development, testing, deployment and production operations.\n\nCommunication: the ability to explain technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and to translate business and mission needs into engineering direction.\n\nEligibility: based in the United States and able to meet the eligibility requirements for U.S. defense work for this requisition.\n\nNice to have\nExperience delivering software to defense, government or other regulated customers, including security accreditation, restricted or disconnected networks, and controlled-data handling.\nExperience in enterprise software or SaaS product development at scale.\nExperience building or leading teams that ship AI-powered product capabilities - MLOps pipelines, AI safety and governance practices, or AI evaluation frameworks.\nExperience working in or with Aerospace & Defense organizations, or on solutions for asset, maintenance, MRO or fleet-readiness management.\nBackground across multiple engineering disciplines (e.g., front-end and back-end, or platform and application development).\nExperience with event-driven architectures, message brokers and streaming platforms.\nTrack record of modernizing legacy systems or migrating to cloud-native architectures.\nFamiliarity with security practices (OWASP, threat modeling, security tooling in CI/CD).\nExperience with organizational design - team structures, team topologies and scaling engineering organizations.\nQualifications\nWhat we’re looking for in you\nYou are technically deep, and your ambition is to multiply the impact of others, not just your own.\nYou lead with context, not control. You set direction and trust your teams to execute.\nYou are comfortable with healthy tension and constructive debate, and you optimize for better decisions rather than comfortable meetings.\nYou are AI-native. You use AI tools in your own work and are energized by helping others do the same.\nYou stay curious and expect the same from your teams.\nYou have grit. You navigate ambiguity, remove blockers and keep teams moving forward.\nAdditional Information\nWe embrace flexibility and hybrid work opportunities to support diverse needs and lifestyles, while also valuing inclusive workplace experiences. By fostering a sense of community, we drive innovation, strengthen connections, and nurture belonging. Our commitment ensures you can work in a way that suits you best, while also engaging with colleagues to share ideas and build meaningful relationships.\nAdditional Information\nWhat We’re Offering\nFlexible paid time off, including sick and holiday\n Medical, dental, & vision insurance\n 401K with Company contribution\n Flexible spending accounts\n Life insurance and disability benefits\n Tuition assistance\n Community involvement and volunteering events\nM/F/Disabled/Vet VEVRAA Federal Contractor. We are a Drug-Free Workplace. Interested candidates should apply at: www.ifs.com/about/careers-at-ifs\nAll 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. VEVRAA Federal Contractor, Equal Opportunity Employer\nAll 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. 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