Enterprise Technical Lead, AI Systems for National Security

Vannevar; Norfolk, San Diego, Washington (VA, CA, District of Columbia); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Vannevar is seeking an Enterprise Technical Lead to own technical direction and engineering delivery for a portfolio of accounts with contracts valued between $10M and $50M.

You will guide architecture decisions, coordinate with customers, and mentor engineers, while ensuring security, compliance, and production readiness across platforms. Regular in‑person collaboration is expected at customer sites.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy across your portfolio, turning mission priorities into architectures, plans, and deployed capabilities
• Decide when to configure existing platform tools, build reusable extensions, or write mission-specific software — and push back on commitments that aren’t securely or sustainably deliverable
• Manage engineering capacity and priorities across accounts — so commitments never outrun the people available to deliver them
• Work directly with customers and end users to understand mission needs and constraints — so what you build matches how the mission actually operates, not just how it looks from a requirements document
• Master each customer’s network topology, enterprise architecture, and mission applications — so you extend what already works instead of building a parallel silo
• Shape new opportunities with customer success, BD, legal, and contracting — contributing technical content to ROMs and SOWs
• Build and validate prototypes with customers and product teams; guide what’s working toward production, scale, and eventual transition to dedicated product teams
• Feed recurring engineering challenges and reusable patterns into quarterly Platform/Product planning — so the platform evolves from what’s actually breaking in the field, not top‑down roadmap guesses
• Enable FDEs to build improvements directly into the platform from the field — so fixes ship at the speed problems are found, instead of waiting on a centralized release cycle
• Produce architecture artifacts (system context, component, interface, data‑flow, deployment diagrams — UML/SysML where useful) and track work in tools like Jira and Notion — so decisions are traceable and a team can pick up the work without you in the room
• Guide teams through security, compliance, and authorization requirements, coordinating with customer security stakeholders — so systems clear ATO and deploy on schedule instead of stalling in review
• Mentor engineers and technical leads; as the role grows, take on performance feedback, reviews, and development planning — so the team can take on more of the portfolio without you as the bottleneck
• Up to 20%, for customer discovery and delivery support
• This role requires regular in‑person engagement with customers and engineers; location will align

Job description

Vannevar is seeking an Enterprise Technical Lead to own technical direction and engineering delivery for a portfolio of accounts with contracts valued between $10M and $50M.

You will guide architecture decisions, coordinate with customers, and mentor engineers, while ensuring security, compliance, and production readiness across platforms. Regular in‑person collaboration is expected at customer sites.