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

Orbis is hiring a Vice President of Engineering to lead our engineering organization through its most significant period of growth. You will lead our engineering directors and managers, hire and develop an exceptional technical workforce, and shape a culture where engineers do their best work while the organization triples in size over the next year.

You will report directly to the CTO and serve as the senior engineering leader accountable for how Orbis builds: the people, the leaders, the culture, the delivery engine, and the engineering standards. The CTO sets technical vision and architecture direction; you own the organization and operating model that turns that vision into reliable delivery at scale.

This role is built for a leader who has done it before in a small, fast-moving company, and who can bring structure without bureaucracy. You will be a visible, trusted voice with engineers, executives, and government customers alike. Our engineers work remotely across the United States and its territories, including Puerto Rico, so building ways of working that span time zones is central to this role.

Key Responsibilities

Lead and develop engineering leadership. Own the engineering leadership team, including directors and managers. Set clear expectations, coach with candor, and build a leadership bench that scales with the company.
Build and retain a high-caliber workforce. Own the engineering workforce plan, hiring strategy, and interview process, and apply our career ladder consistently, to triple the team without lowering the bar. Make timely, fair decisions on performance and staffing.
Shape the engineering culture. Define working norms, career paths, recognition, and feedback loops around how our engineers actually want to work, and protect that culture as we grow.
Communicate with clarity at every level. Set direction and context for the whole engineering organization, and represent engineering to the executive team, the board as needed, and customers. Translate technical trade-offs into business and mission terms.
Own delivery and accountability. Partner with product leadership to turn priorities into predictable delivery, balancing roadmap commitments, technical debt, architecture, and capacity across a growing portfolio. Establish the metrics and operating rhythm that show how engineering is performing.
Set technical direction and consolidate platforms. Working with the CTO, rationalize the toolchain, development environments, and shared infrastructure across our Rust, Go, TypeScript, and React codebases and our AWS, GCP, and Cloudflare environments to reduce duplication and speed delivery.
Scale skills and knowledge. Put documentation standards, shared engineering practices, onboarding, and training in place so knowledge lives in the organization rather than with individuals.
Hold the bar on security and quality. Ensure engineering practices meet the security, compliance, and reliability standards our government and allied customers require, including deployments onto small form factor computers in constrained and disconnected environments.
Lead a remote team across U.S. time zones and territories. Set core collaboration hours, meeting cadences, and on-call rotations that work across the continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and other territories, with written, asynchronous communication as the default.