Director, Head of Software Engineering
$130,000–$210,000 year
On-siteFalls Church, Virginia, United States
Job Summary
Design and lead HITT's agentic engineering practice from the ground up, defining the operating model, team structure, and software development lifecycle for AI-enabled delivery. Establish standards, guardrails, and best practices for agentic development, including AI coding agents, prompt engineering, and human-in-the-loop review. Recruit and hire engineers and leaders for lean, agile, AI-augmented teams while designing training programs to upskill existing developers in new methods. Partner with the CIO on the enterprise technology, data, and AI roadmap, ensuring the engineering practice accelerates the firm's broader digital transformation. Balance execution with innovation to deliver reliable, fast software for high-velocity, decentralized field environments, while championing responsible AI use and model governance across the portfolio.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field
- 12+ years of progressive software engineering experience
- 5+ years leading engineering teams or organizations
- Current, hands-on experience with AI-enabled and agentic software development, including AI coding agents and assistants (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor), LLM APIs, agent frameworks and orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation, and evaluation practices
- Demonstrated success recruiting strong engineers and training existing developers in new tools, methods, and ways of working
- Proven track record leading lean, agile teams that ship, balancing innovation with operational discipline in a complex enterprise
- Deep grounding in modern software engineering practice: cloud-native architecture, APIs and integration, CI/CD, DevSecOps, and test automation
- Executive-level communication and presentation skills; able to build conviction with C-suite audiences and translate deep technical topics for business leaders
- Financial and vendor management acumen, with experience owning budgets and managing platform and tooling ecosystems
Desired Qualifications
- Advanced degree
- Experience building a team, practice, or product organization from scratch
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