Team operations & delivery

• Reach for culture before process. Ownership, high accountability, and zero excuses solve more than any ritual will add process only where culture alone can't carry the weight
• Keep the rituals you do have honest: co-create them with the team, cut what's theater, and improve estimation and predictability over time
• Run retros that close the loop improvements that ship and stick, not a list nobody revisits
• Manage to a small set of meaningful health and delivery metrics, and guard against gaming them (velocity is a diagnostic, never a target)
  

Product & business alignment

• Partner with whoever sits closest to the customer for your team Product, Design, and GtM if you're leading product engineering; analysts, AI/ML, and data consumers if you're leading data engineering. The partners shift; the customer obsession doesn't
• Translate mission and business goals into clear engineering outcomes, and be able to explain to anyone how your team's work moves the business
• Push back with conviction, clarity, and a willingness to have your mind changed
• Keep the team focused and healthy when priorities shift, without becoming a silo
  

What We're Looking For

Required

• 7+ years of engineering experience, including substantial time leading and growing engineering teams
• Real technical depth you can still demonstrate you can reason through a system design, spot the failure modes, and say what you'd cut to ship first
• A track record of owning delivery for a team: planning, estimation, and reliable execution, including holding the line on performance, scalability, and technical debt
• Direct experience with the hard parts of management hard feedback that landed, a struggling performer you diagnosed and worked, a real exit you ran well
• Strong communication in every direction. You can push back on leadership, explain technical work to a non-technical audience, coach engineers, and over communicate before anyone has to ask
• Comfortable with high autonomy and accountability in a fast-moving, early-stage environment. You're at home in ambiguity and you don't wait for direction
  

Nice to have

• Experience building complex data or AI systems large-scale ingestion, pipeline orchestration, schema evolution, entity resolution or managing fast-moving web application teams
• Background in government, defense tech, or another regulated environment
• An active TS/SCI clearance, or eligibility to obtain one
• Experience owning platform-level infrastructure from initial design through scaling it across multiple teams
  

How You'll Operate Here

Four traits show up in everything we do, and we'll probe for all four when we talk:

• Bias for action: you move decisively with incomplete information. Action is the best medicine
• Strong opinions, loosely held: you argue a clear point of view, then update quickly when the evidence changes. Intellectual honesty over ego
• Continuous improvement: you measure how your team works, run real feedback loops, and close them
• People growth: you develop engineers, give direct feedback, and handle the hard calls with both care and spine
  

Our Principles

We live these every day. If they don't sound like you, this won't be a fit and we'd both rather know now.

• Impact. Our work matters. We take a lot of pride in building to advance mission outcomes.
• Overdeliver. We go above and beyond in everything we do - creating products and serving our users
• Hustle. We get stuff done, no matter what it takes.
• Empathy. Our users’ problems are our own. We don't push products, we solve problems.
• Humility. We’re not afraid to admit what we don’t know. Our job is to listen and grow.
• Integrity. Transparency & respect above all else. It’s non-negotiable, even when it isn't easy

Benefits & Structure

• Flexible schedule - We all have other things going on in our lives. Doctor visits, kids’ activities, dog walks - take care of it whenever you have to. And work from home when you need to.
• Sizeable equity - We’re building something with massive upside potential, and you’ll have ownership in that. This is ours.
• Flexible vacation time - Use what you want, as long as you’re taking care of what needs to get done.
• Full health, dental, and vision insurance.

To apply, visit obviant.com/careers

Obviant is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All 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.