Head of Engineering
No salary listed
Expert
Washington, DC, USA
Hybrid
Engineering ManagementEngineering Leadership
About the job
Requirements
- 10+ years of progressive experience spanning software engineering, data architecture, and engineering management, including at least 3 years in a formal people-leadership role such as Engineering Manager, Director, or equivalent.
- Demonstrated experience owning data architecture decisions at scale, including designing data infrastructure.
- Strong program and delivery management instincts, including owning timelines, measuring level of effort, and coordinating cross-functionally with Engineering and Product leads.
- A builder background with sufficiently recent hands-on engineering experience to establish technical credibility and make architectural and development decisions.
- Proven ability to hire, manage, and grow engineers, with a track record of building functional, high-velocity teams.
- Native fluency with modern AI tools, including daily use of AI coding assistants and agents, and a perspective on how AI changes engineering organization design, hiring, and velocity.
- Comfort operating in a dual-use environment, with a security-conscious approach and willingness to learn applicable federal compliance requirements such as FedRAMP, CMMC, and CUI handling.
- Startup experience, ideally at Series A–B stage, where ambiguity is normal and the team is still being built.
Responsibilities
- Own long-term data architecture strategy across threat intelligence pipelines, ensuring systems scale as data volume, data types, customer count, and federal compliance requirements grow.
- Make platform decisions on storage, pipelines, data modeling, databases and data warehousing, and machine learning and artificial intelligence operations, balancing speed, cost, and dual-use constraints for commercial and federal customers, including data segregation, CUI handling, and FedRAMP/CMMC-adjacent considerations.
- Partner with Product and GRC on data governance, lineage, and security by design as the platform matures.
- Implement program management discipline for engineering delivery, including technical debt and product roadmaps, sprint cadence, dependency tracking, release velocity tracking, and risk surfacing.
- Own delivery predictability so leadership and the board can trust engineering commitments and timelines.
- Run cross-functional planning with Product and GTM to align engineering output with enterprise and federal sales cycles.
- Stay hands-on through code review, architecture decisions, and resolving difficult technical problems.
- Set and enforce engineering standards for code quality, testing, continuous integration and continuous delivery, security practices, and technical documentation.
- Drive decisions on system architecture, technology stack evolution, and technical debt prioritization.
- Manage, mentor, and grow a team of engineers, including hiring, performance management, and career development.
- Build a healthy engineering culture as the team scales, with clear ownership, high trust, and low ego.
- Translate technical realities into business terms and business needs into technical terms between individual contributors and company leadership.
- Use AI coding assistants, agentic tools, and large language model-based systems as a regular part of engineering workflows.
- Identify where AI can responsibly accelerate engineering velocity, including code generation, testing, and internal tooling, and where it introduces risks requiring guardrails, especially for federal customers.
- Help define the product's use of AI, including model selection, evaluation, reliability, and cost tradeoffs, in partnership with Product and applied data science talent.
Desired Qualifications
- Prior experience at a company serving both commercial and federal or defense customers.
- Experience with threat intelligence, geospatial or open-source intelligence data, or security-adjacent platforms.
- Existing or prior eligibility for a U.S. government security clearance.
- Experience establishing engineering processes from scratch at an early-stage company, rather than operating within an existing process.
About the company
Base Operations provides a cloud-based risk management platform for proactive corporate security. It helps globally operating businesses protect personnel and assets by delivering granular, street-level threat intelligence through an AI-powered data aggregation of public and proprietary sources. The platform turns large volumes of threat data into actionable security insights via visualization and analysis, enabling organizations to understand and mitigate risks to their operations worldwide. What sets Base Operations apart is its emphasis on street-level, actionable threat intelligence drawn from diverse data sources and its subscription-based security platform that supports ongoing risk management. The company’s goal is to help organizations maintain the safety of their employees and continuity of operations by anticipating and responding to security threats across the globe.
Company Size
11-50
Company Stage
Series A
Total Funding
$18.4M
Headquarters
Washington DC, District of Columbia
Founded
2018
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Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- DefenseScoop said Air Mobility Command is deploying Base Operations' platform in 2025.
- Base Operations published a 2025 manufacturing reshoring report, widening enterprise lead generation.
- The company targets global corporate security, a recurring subscription market with cross-border demand.
What critics are saying
- Air Force competes with 19 contractors on a $4 billion base-operations IDIQ.
- Base Operations disclosed no contract value, limiting revenue visibility after the May 2025 award.
- If AFWERX pilots stall, larger defense primes can replicate its data-driven features.
What makes Base Operations unique
- Base Operations maps 200+ million incidents into street-level threat intelligence.
- AFWERX awarded Base Operations a Direct-to-Phase II contract on May 27, 2025.
- BaseScore gives 0-100 location risk scores across thousands of sites.
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Benefits
- Remote Work Options