Senior Engineering Manager

About Obviant

The defense market is surging, but the data that drives it hasn't kept up. Companies, government, and investors are forced into heavily manual processes, stitching together hundreds of disparate sources to make decisions that carry real national security weight.

Obviant has built the data source of truth and the AI tooling for defense acquisition. We fuse thousands of structured and unstructured sources into a coherent picture of budget, programs, and the organizations running them. We have high satisfaction at top-tier customers, we're growing fast, we're backed by leading venture funds, and we're advised by veterans from national security and the technology industry.

We're hiring a Senior Engineering Manager to own one team end to end either our data engineering team or our product/web application team, depending on where your strengths land. You'll inherit an existing team and, as we grow, help expand it. Your hiring bar becomes the team's bar.

This is not a coordination role. You'll set the technical bar, run the delivery cadence, grow the engineers on your team, and stay close enough to the code to earn their respect.

We set obsessively high standards, and here that isn't a slogan. Our customers make acquisition and investment decisions on what we show them, so being roughly right is not a viable product. Others might say we're too particular about it. That's fine we're running our own race, not theirs.

We're looking for someone who pairs technical excellence with the ability to extend that practice into a team leader who stays credible in the work while multiplying it through others.

Four areas below, with the understanding that the list is never complete. Nobody here says  that isn't my job.

• Set technical direction with your senior engineers, and guide the team through design tradeoffs, architecture decisions, and implementation quality

• Own the engineering standards and the quality bar you decide what  good  means on your team and make it stick, without becoming the bottleneck

• Raise the bar of the whole team, not just your own output. Mentor, review, and build a culture where quality is the default rather than a checklist someone enforces

• Drop into a tactical role when it's the fastest way to unblock the team or land a business-critical outcome. Do, don't say

• Develop engineers deliberately: real growth plans, direct feedback on a real cadence, and clear leveling conversations

• Keep it all in the open. Deliver hard feedback with candor and empathy, face to face, never through back channels

• Make the hard calls with care and spine diagnose underperformance early, coach honestly, and handle exits with dignity for the person and clarity for the team

• Hire and expand the team as we grow, holding the bar under pressure to fill seats

• Manage up as well as down. Keep leadership and your peers ahead of what's coming, expedite early, and make sure nobody is ever caught off guard by your team's direction or risks

• 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)

• 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