Director, Baseball Product Engineering

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

Job summary

Washington Nationals are seeking a Director, Baseball Product Engineering to lead the BPE team and shape product development across coaching, player, and decision-making tools. You will unify the visual language, define requirements, and guide rapid, AI-informed development in collaboration with Baseball Systems and R&D leadership.

You will oversee a team of Forward Deployed Engineers, ensuring standards, guardrails for AI tooling, and alignment with organizational strategy and performance

Qualifications

• 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, confidential environment.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with Baseball Systems to define product strategy and requirements.
• Develop a product management framework aligning leadership input with stakeholder needs.
• Iterate with stakeholders on new features to maximize organizational impact.
• Define visual design standards for applications, reports, and strategy materials.

Skills

Product development

Data-driven decision-making

Leadership

Communication

AI tooling guidance

Tools

CI/CD

AI tooling platforms

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.

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

The Nationals offer a competitive and comprehensive benefits package that presently includes:

• 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.

Equal Opportunity Employer

This employer is required to notify all applicants of their rights pursuant to federal employment laws. For further information, please review the Know Your Rights notice from the Department of Labor.