Company Overview

Orbis is a technology company that delivers sovereign intelligence and decision capabilities to the United States Government and its allies. We convert complex information and operational systems into decisive outcomes, giving public institutions and critical enterprises the tools to move faster, see clearer, and act first in an increasingly contested world.

We are not a consulting firm and not a systems integrator. Every Orbis team is built around practitioners who have operated at the mission edge, and every engagement is judged on one thing: whether it produces working capability, not slide decks. Solutions forged from experience; that is how we build, and it is how we hire.

Job Summary

Lead the engineering team behind the Orbis AI portfolio — the Agent Catalog, the OSINT Agent Harness, and Pulse Analytics — and be accountable for what it puts in front of users. You will grow a team of software and research engineers, set the cadence that turns applied research into deployed capability, and hold the line on the accuracy, explainability, and reliability that mission work demands. This role exists because Orbis AI is measured on capability delivered to users, not on experiments run.

Travel: Up to 20% for customer engagement, integration support, and team collaboration.

Key Responsibilities

Lead, coach, and grow a team of software and research engineers, owning hiring, onboarding, performance, and career development.
Own the team's delivery commitments end to end — scope, sequence, and land work each cycle, surfacing status and risk early rather than at the deadline.
Drive the research-to-product path: set direction with product management, define what a result must demonstrate to become a roadmap commitment, and stop work that is not paying off.
Enforce the Orbis AI product principles — accuracy and trustworthiness, security and data sovereignty, rapid iteration, deploy anywhere, explainability, and performance — in design review rather than after release.
Establish engineering standards that hold under pressure: design and code review, testing, observability, on-call, and incident follow-through.
Guide architecture for systems that must run in cloud, on-premises, and edge environments from a single codebase.
Clear cross-team blockers — dependencies, interface contracts, and competing priorities — with the product teams that consume Orbis AI capabilities.
Travel up to 20% for customer engagement, integration support, and team collaboration.

Required Qualifications

6+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 2+ years directly managing engineers
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related technical field, or equivalent professional experience
Track record of delivering meaningful product surfaces on committed timelines
Technical depth in distributed systems, backend services, or AI and data platforms sufficient to lead design review credibly
Demonstrated ability to grow engineers, including leveling, performance conversations, and hiring against a bar
Clear written and verbal communication with both engineering and non-engineering audiences
Willingness to travel up to 20%

Desired Qualifications

Experience managing teams building agentic AI, LLM-backed products, or knowledge-representation and retrieval systems
Experience managing or partnering closely with applied research, and judgment about when a result is ready to productize
Experience shipping software into constrained environments such as on-premises, disconnected, or edge deployments
Familiarity with containerized deployment (Docker, Kubernetes) across cloud, on-premises, and edge targets
Prior experience in a government, national security, or otherwise regulated environment
Experience with high-performance analytics or data-intensive systems operating close to the user and the data

Physical Requirements

Prolonged periods of sitting at a desk and working on a computer
Participation in virtual and in-person meetings
Ability to attend planned meetings and/or work in classified spaces for extended periods within the specified work regions