Director, Baseball Product Engineering

Washington Nationals; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 160,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision, life and AD&D

Short- and long-term disability

Flexible spending accounts

401(k) and pension plan

Complimentary Nationals tickets

Employee discounts

Free onsite fitness center

Job summary

Washington Nationals is seeking a Director, Baseball Product Engineering to lead the BPE team and align product strategy with baseball operations. You will define requirements for existing apps, guide new AI-enabled development, and unify the visual language across tools used by coaches, players, and decision-makers.

Ideal candidates have proven leadership of technical teams, strong product management, and an ability to translate research into actionable features that drive competitive advantage

Qualifications

• Experience leading technical or interdisciplinary teams.
• Strong understanding of evaluation, development, and baseball decision-making.
• Excellent communication, project management, and interpersonal skills.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, confidential environment.
• Alignment with the organization’s values of joy, humility, integrity and competitiveness.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with Application Developers to define a product strategy for rapid iteration with stakeholders.
• Build a product management framework to coalesce leadership and developer needs into a plan.
• Generate high-quality Product Requirements Documents reflecting challenges and impact.
• Iterate on new features with stakeholders to maximize organizational impact.
• Define standards for single-user/vibe-coded applications and enforce them with leaders.
• Guide the use of AI in product engineering with guardrails and governance.
• Oversee a small team of Forward Deployed Engineers and translate research into roadmaps.

Skills

Product development

Software development practices

Data engineering

Application development

Tools

CI/CD

AI tooling

Data pipelines

Job description

Our Vision

To become baseball’s highest-performing organization and the envy of professional sports. We will be defined by our relentless pursuit of excellence, strengthened by our connection, and fueled by our positive energy.

• Joy: We want to be around people that like to have fun. We remain optimistic through the ups and downs, we enjoy the process, and we share in something bigger than ourselves.
• Humility: We don’t have all the answers. We lead with curiosity, listen generously, and seek growth from every experience – especially the tough ones. We have gotten over ourselves.
• Integrity: We do the right thing, especially when it’s hard. We act with honesty, accountability, and respect for our teammates and ourselves. We treat the custodian like the king.
• Competitiveness: We embrace challenges and thrive in high-stakes environments. We prepare relentlessly. We are energized by the idea of keeping score.

Our Vision

To become baseball’s highest-performing organization and the envy of professional sports. We will be defined by our relentless pursuit of excellence, strengthened by our connection, and fueled by our positive energy.

• Joy: We want to be around people that like to have fun. We remain optimistic through the ups and downs, we enjoy the process, and we share in something bigger than ourselves.
• Humility: We don’t have all the answers. We lead with curiosity, listen generously, and seek growth from every experience – especially the tough ones. We have gotten over ourselves.
• Integrity: We do the right thing, especially when it’s hard. We act with honesty, accountability, and respect for our teammates and ourselves. We treat the custodian like the king.
• Competitiveness: We embrace challenges and thrive in high-stakes environments. We prepare relentlessly. We are energized by the idea of keeping score.

Our Core Values

• Joy: We want to be around people that like to have fun. We remain optimistic through the ups and downs, we enjoy the process, and we share in something bigger than ourselves.
• Humility: We don’t have all the answers. We lead with curiosity, listen generously, and seek growth from every experience – especially the tough ones. We have gotten over ourselves.
• Integrity: We do the right thing, especially when it’s hard. We act with honesty, accountability, and respect for our teammates and ourselves. We treat the custodian like the king.
• Competitiveness: We embrace challenges and thrive in high-stakes environments. We prepare relentlessly. We are energized by the idea of keeping score.

Position Overview

The Director, Baseball Product Engineering will serve as a senior product strategist and manager within Baseball Operations. The Baseball Product Engineering (BPE) team will be a small group of Forward-Deployed Engineers, operating in tandem with Baseball Systems to define product requirements for existing applications, strategize the development of the new wave of application development facilitated by LLMs, and unify the visual language and design of the flagship technical products (including web applications, reports, development plans, etc.) provided to coaches, players, and decision-makers. This position will lead BPE, carefully devising a strategy for product development in R&D that empowers rapid and accurate decision-making in all corners of the organization. BPE will ultimately ensure that all organizational product development strategically aligns with the data and software platform constructed by Baseball Systems.

Key Responsibilities

Collaboration

• Collaborate with Application Developers in Baseball Systems to create a product development strategy that empowers existing technical experts within the organization while facilitating rapid iteration with stakeholders
• Collaborate with R&D leaders to build an advantage-seeking product roadmap that funnels traffic to our opinionated, high-quality models and applications, preventing product silos while creating opportunities for the org to better leverage research
• Collaborate with organizational leadership to understand the areas in which rapid product development can drive impact, and optimize for those areas

Product Development

• Build a product management framework for the organization, in which product requirements from organizational leadership, analysts, developers, and engineers are coalesced into an optimized product plan
• Generate high-quality Product Requirement Documents that capture stakeholder needs and preferences, illustrate technical challenges, and optimize for organizational impact
• Iterate with stakeholders on new features, ensuring functionality maximizes org impact
• Develop standards and guidance for the creation of single-user or minimal-user vibe-coded applications, and, with the support of Baseball Systems and organizational leadership, enforce those standards
• Provide organizational guidance on the use of AI in all stages of the product engineering processes, while collaborating with R&D leaders to build appropriate guardrails on the use of agentic tooling with proprietary data outside the department
• Identify high leverage R&D outputs that exist outside the auspices of existing data platforms (eg. postgame reports, player development plans) and engineer short-term product solutions for them, and long-term product roadmaps to integrate them into existing data platforms
• Define and support the implementation of the visual design language of the Washington Nationals across all applications, reporting, and strategy materials

Strategy & Management

• Oversee a small team of Forward Deployed Engineers who execute on BPE’s product, engineering, collaboration, and strategy goals
• Maximize the leverage of internal research by identifying arbitrage opportunities for the org, and subsequently collaborate with R&D and leadership to exploit those edges via product dev
• Partner with other leaders and departments to ensure that research outcomes translate directly into competitive advantages on the field

Technical Qualifications

• Product development to support data-driven decision-making
• Modern software development practices, including automated testing, code review, CI/CD, maintainable architecture, and responsible use of AI-assisted development tools
• Data engineering architecture to support research and rapid decision-making
• Application development, product design, and data storytelling

Leadership Qualifications

• Demonstrated leadership experience managing technical or interdisciplinary teams
• Deep understanding of evaluation, development, and baseball decision-making
• Excellent communication, project/product management, and interpersonal skills
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, collaborative, and highly confidential environment
• Deep alignment with and promotion of the organization’s values of joy, humility, integrity and competitiveness and vision to create an organization that becomes the envy of sport.

Compensation

The projected annual salary range for this position is $160,000 - $240,000 per year. Actual pay is based on several factors, including but not limited to the applicant’s: qualifications, skills, expertise, education/training, certifications, and other organization requirements. Starting salaries for new employees are frequently not at the top of the applicable salary range.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, life and AD&D insurance
• Short- and long-term disability insurance
• Flexible spending accounts
• 401(k) and pension plan
• Access to complimentary tickets to Nationals home games
• Employee discounts
• Free onsite fitness center

Equal Opportunity Employer

The Nationals are dedicated to offering equal employment and advancement opportunities to all individuals regardless of their race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, marital status, personal appearance, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, family responsibilities, matriculation, political affiliation, genetic information, disability, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law.