Vice President, Software Engineering

Overview

Hawk Eye 360 is seeking an exceptional engineering leader to scale our Software Engineering functional area. Software Engineering includes several engineering teams responsible for building and maintaining Hawk Eye 360's software platform, software applications, data pipelines, production operations, customer-facing interfaces & integrations, and software architecture. This role requires deep technical breadth in relevant domain areas, plus proven leadership experience managing engineering directors and navigating organizational dynamics.

As Vice President, you'll be responsible for the full lifecycle of organizational planning and engineering strategy across Software Engineering. You will be expected to set the overall technical vision, with a deep understanding of technical details, and ensure alignment and strong execution across teams. The ideal candidate will have proven leadership experience building a software development organization that delivers a high-agency, high-velocity development culture with empowered and motivated engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead the overarching technical vision, engineering strategy, and organizational planning for Software Engineering. Anticipate future software needs across a multiple-year time horizon, create technical leverage, and drive strategic technology decisions that impact company-wide velocity and capability

• Manage, coach, and empower a team of high-performing Engineering Directors. Ensure each director has the support needed to scale their team

• Scale the Software Engineering organization through strategic hiring, organizational design, and capability development

• Set organizational standards and drive performance excellence across all Software Engineering teams. Build a high-velocity engineering culture that iteratively delivers user outcomes with scalable, maintainable, production-ready systems

• Build and champion a healthy on-call system to rapidly resolve customer-impacting issues

• Partner with executive leadership and cross-functional stakeholders to align Software Engineering strategy with company objectives. Collaborate with other engineering VPs, Directors, Product leadership, and business stakeholders to define platform architecture and technical roadmaps for enterprise-wide initiatives

Skills and Qualifications

Essential education and experience:

• BS/MS degree in Computer Science or related technical field

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant focus on cloud-based software development and deploying production-level software

• 6+ years of experience leading engineering teams

• Proven track record managing and developing engineering managers, principal-level engineers, and technical leaders

• Demonstrated ability to scale engineering teams, navigate organizational dynamics, and make strategic technical decisions that create long-term competitive advantage

• Experience contributing and collaborating on business strategy beyond functional area responsibilities

• Experience leading teams building production-facing cloud software with modern development tooling:
Full-stack software applications, data orchestration, cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), container orchestration (Kubernetes preferred), Docker, CI/CD, observability and monitoring (Prometheus, open telemetry, Grafana, Loki, etc)

• Hands-on familiarity with backend software (Java, Spring Boot, Python, etc), frontend frameworks (React, Angular, etc), databases and data warehouses (Postgre

SQL, Snowflake, etc), and other industry-standard software development

• Excellent communication skills with ability to translate technical concepts to business stakeholders

Desirable:

• Background in satellite-based remote sensing, planning and optimization systems (e.g. timefold), and collaborating with physics-heavy research teams

• Familiarity with AI and machine learning infrastructure, software, training, and deployment

• Familiarity with backend "data platform" systems: data warehouses, extract-load-transform (ELT) operations, and transformation tools (dbt)

• Familiarity with modern on-premise computing and/or a hybrid-cloud environment

Base…