Engineering Manager, Mission Agents

About the role

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 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 worlflows.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.