Engineering Manager, AI Platform

Vannevar is a defense technology company building AI to deter our adversaries.  In the 21st century, conflict moves at algorithmic speed and foresight equals firepower. Our agentic AI is purpose-built to compete with China-from cross-Strait conflict to gray zone coercion. Trained on the most mission-relevant datasets in defense, our technology models adversary behavior, simulates campaigns, and recommends the best course of action to decision makers. Our AI systems are some of the most trusted in the industry and actively used on the front lines of the Indo-Pacific to keep the peace and save lives.

Exceptional technology starts with exceptional people. Vannevar is a small agile team combining world-class engineers with veteran strategists who bring deep expertise in defense and tradecraft. We’re building a company defined by mission impact, user empathy, and disciplined growth. In just three years, we grew from $3M to $80M in ARR, achieved early profitability, and reached unicorn status-proving that disruption doesn’t require an ego, and staying power doesn’t mean standing still.

About the role

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 Senior Engineering Manager to lead our AI Platform organization. This team provides the durable, reusable foundation that product and mission teams use to build, operate, and improve AI-powered capabilities at Vannevar.

The AI Platform brings together two areas:

• Machine Learning platform: The standard pipelines and shared services that power reliable, scalable data and model enrichments
• Agents platform: The runtime foundation for building and operating agents, with a focus on durable execution, observability, evaluation, quality, and safe, dependable operation at scale.

You’ll lead the team responsible for turning these capabilities into an integrated platform: one that makes it easy for product teams to ship AI-enabled workflows while maintaining the reliability, quality, security, and operational rigor required for national security missions.

This role is ideal for a technical, platform-minded engineering leader who has built depth in machine learning, applied that foundation to LLM product development, and can set platform strategy, develop strong engineers, and make sound architectural tradeoffs across data, ML, agent systems, and cloud infrastructure.

What you’ll do

• Lead the AI Platform organization: Set the technical direction, operating model, and roadmap for the teams responsible for enrichments and the agents platform.
• Build the enrichments foundation: Own the standard pipelines, shared services, and operational patterns used to run data and model enrichments reliably and efficiently across Vannevar products.
• Scale the agents runtime: Lead the development of durable agent execution capabilities, including orchestration, state and workflow management, reliability, observability, evaluation, and quality controls.
• Define platform standards: Establish clear interfaces, reusable primitives, and engineering practices that enable product teams to build AI-enabled capabilities without reinventing foundational infrastructure.
• Raise the quality bar: Develop measurement, testing, evaluation, and feedback-loop practices that improve the correctness, safety, and usefulness of agent behavior in production.
• Drive cross-functional execution: Partner with Product, Design, Mission, Security, and Infrastructure teams to prioritize platform investments and deliver high-impact outcomes.
• Balance velocity and reliability: Make pragmatic decisions about where to standardize, where to iterate, and how to manage the operational risks of AI systems supporting real-world missions.
• Grow a high-performing team: Recruit, mentor, and develop engineers and engineering leaders; foster a culture of ownership, technical excellence, customer empathy, and mission impact.

What we look for

• 3+ years of experience as an engineering manager, with demonstrated ability to lead, coach, and build software engineering teams.
• 5+ years of hands-on machine learning experience and 2+ years building agentic AI systems in production.
• Experience building or operating platforms used by multiple internal product or engineering teams.
• Deep familiarity with AI/ML or agentic systems in production, including the practical challenges of orchestration, evaluation, observability, quality, reliability, and cost.
• Experience leading teams that build workflow, data, ML, or service platforms with high standards for operational excellence.
• Ability to lead through ambiguity, balancing speed, reliability, security, and mission impact.
• Ability to juggle multiple priorities across different teams, stakeholders, and product surfaces without losing focus on execution quality.
• Track record of data-driven decision making-argue with metrics, not gut feelings.
• Excellent communication skills, cross-functional leadership, and project ownership.
• Proficiency with Python, PostgreSQL or other relational databases, AWS or other cloud services, and modern distributed-system and workflow-engineering patterns
• Willingness to travel to offsites, team syncs, and customer sites.
• U.S. Citizenship, required to access U.S.-only data systems.

Nice to have

• Experience with agent frameworks and workflow orchestration systems such as LangGraph, Temporal, Agno, or similar tools.
• Experience with ML platforms, data pipelines, model evaluation, or retrieval and enrichment systems.
• Experience building secure, observable, and highly reliable systems in regulated or mission-critical environments.
• Active security clearance or ability/willingness to obtain one.
• Prior experience building software for defense, national security, or intelligence use cases.

What we offer

We’re proud to offer competitive benefits that support our employees. Some key highlights of our benefits package include:

• 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

Vannevar is an equal opportunity employer, and qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, or disability status.

We encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply, even if you don't feel like you're a perfect fit. If you're passionate about contributing to our mission, we'd love to hear from you!

IMPORTANT NOTICE

We are committed to protecting the privacy of all applicants. Official emails from the company will come from an @vannevarlabs.com domain. Under no circumstances will a legitimate representative from our company contact you to request passwords, financial information, or other sensitive personal data. Please be vigilant of potential scams.