Director of Engineering

Seekr • Reston, VA

8h • $200,000 - $275,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Seekr is seeking a Software Engineering Director to lead the team responsible for scaling and productionizing applications in its federal solutions portfolio. The director will partner with AI engineers, software developers, product leaders, and program stakeholders to address mission-centric problems across commercial cloud, AWS GovCloud, and fully disconnected networks.

The role focuses on building and leading a high-performing engineering team that delivers performant, scalable, secure, and durable applications. The director will set technical direction, establish ownership and delivery practices, develop engineering talent, and guide solutions through accreditation so they can be used in real-world mission environments. They will be accountable for how federal solutions are staffed, built, deployed, and accredited, and for ensuring engineering decisions remain sound across multiple programs over time.

The position requires adaptability as requirements, deployment targets, user feedback, and security controls can change during delivery. The director will help the team manage this churn while maintaining delivery focus and mission readiness. Seekr offers a flexible hybrid work environment with offices in Reston, Virginia, and Austin, Texas. The proposed salary range is $200,000–$275,000 USD; the role may also be eligible for annual bonus, equity, and other incentive compensation. Applicants must meet the stated U.S. government trade-regulation eligibility requirements.

Requirements

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience for the Director level, including at least 1 year leading engineering teams that build and operate large-scale distributed systems.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• Demonstrated success leading engineers and delivering production systems, with technical depth to guide architecture, debugging, and operational decisions.
• Technical depth and applied experience sufficient to lead teams working with Python, including asynchronous patterns, packaging, and dependency management.
• Experience with PostgreSQL or a comparable relational database management system.
• Experience with RESTful API design; FastAPI is preferred.
• Experience with containerization and orchestration, including Docker, Kubernetes, and Helm.
• Experience with distributed systems fundamentals, including idempotency, retries, eventual consistency, queueing, failure isolation, and graceful degradation.
• Experience with CI/CD; GitLab CI is preferred.
• Experience with automated unit, integration, and end-to-end testing.
• Experience with observability, including structured logging, performance metrics, and tracing.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with technical and non-technical audiences.
• U.S. citizenship, lawful permanent residence, protected-individual status as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligibility to obtain required U.S. Department of State or Department of Commerce authorizations.
• Ability to explain the tradeoffs behind team architecture decisions, including decisions that did not work and how the team adapted.
• Ability to help debug systems in environments that cannot be reproduced locally, using limited evidence such as logs and stack traces.
• Ability to establish responsible practices for AI coding assistants while maintaining standards for review, testing, security, and code ownership.
• Experience leading teams shipping AI-backed features such as LLM inference, agents, or retrieval, and sound judgment about when to use those approaches.

Nice To Haves

• FastAPI experience.
• GitLab CI experience.
• Experience leading teams that have shipped AI-backed features, including LLM inference, agents, or retrieval.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop software engineers working closely with AI engineers to ship high-quality, production-ready features.
• Own team execution and the path from functional prototype to stable, scalable, accredited service.
• Set technical direction, drive sound decision-making, and establish and enforce engineering best practices across the federal engineering team.
• Guide the design and delivery of systems that satisfy security controls as a first-class requirement.
• Ensure the team builds and maintains hardened container images, CI/CD pipelines, and deployment artifacts for cloud, restricted, and air-gapped environments.
• Lead incident response and root cause analysis for production issues in environments with limited observability and access.
• Partner with Product, Program, Security, and customer-facing leaders to prioritize work, manage delivery risk, and translate requirements into actionable engineering plans.
• Hire, coach, and retain engineers; set clear expectations; provide regular feedback; and create development opportunities through code review, design review, pairing, and delegated ownership.

Benefits

• Equity ownership through RSUs.
• Unlimited paid time off.
• 14 paid company holidays.
• Flexible hybrid work environment.
• Role-appropriate compensation structure, potentially including bonuses or other incentive compensation.
• 401(k) with company match.
• Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance coverage starting on day one for employees and their families.
• Paid parental leave for birth, adoption, or foster placement.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director