Job Purpose/Summary
This role leads the people, operating system, and delivery effectiveness of Knowmadics' Advanced Technologies software engineering organization across multiple product and program efforts. The role is expected to carry approximately six to ten senior engineers or technical leads as direct reports, plus selected individual contributors, and to provide managerial accountability for an overall software engineering organization of roughly 20 to 25 people.
Reporting to the CPTO, this role owns day-to-day people leadership, organizational design, workforce planning, performance management, engineering capacity, and cross-team delivery discipline. The Manager partners closely with the EVP of Product, Director of Product, EVP of Production Engineering, program leaders, and senior technical staff. Product leaders retain ownership of product outcomes and priorities; senior technical leaders retain architecture and domain authority; this role makes those functions more effective by creating clear accountability, healthy teams, and reliable execution.
This is a technical player-coach role rather than a coordination-only position. The Manager stays close to the work through design and code reviews, incident and support investigation, technical planning, and small unplanned contributions when appropriate. Planned roadmap work remains with the engineering teams. The Manager is also a hands-on owner of the Jira execution model across engineering efforts, helping teams maintain actionable tickets, healthy backlogs, visible dependencies, and credible delivery forecasts without turning process into an end in itself.
Success in this role looks like engineers who receive useful coaching, senior engineers who deliver meaningful impact to the business and grow into effective leaders, product teams that understand what matters next, risks that surface early, and software that moves from prototype through production with predictable delivery, appropriate technical quality, and mission-user trust.
Duties and Responsibilities
People Leadership and Organization
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Lead and develop senior engineers, engineering leads, and selected individual contributors through regular coaching, performance management, growth planning, and succession development.
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Design sustainable reporting lines and team structures; lead hiring, onboarding, retention, workforce planning, and capability development for software engineering.
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Allocate engineering capacity across product, applied research, customer-funded, and internal efforts; resolve priority conflicts, reduce fragmentation, and surface portfolio tradeoffs to the CPTO.
Delivery and Jira Operations
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Own the software engineering operating rhythm across product efforts, including practical Jira standards, actionable backlogs, dependency management, release readiness, and escalation paths.
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Partner with Product and Program leaders to convert priorities and milestones into feasible plans, staffing assumptions, acceptance criteria, and credible delivery forecasts.
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Use flow, quality, and reliability data to identify bottlenecks and improve delivery; keep technical debt, risks, and commitments visible without using metrics as individual productivity scores.
Technical and Cross-Functional Leadership
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Stay close to architecture, code, incidents, and technical planning; contribute to small unplanned work when useful without becoming the critical-path owner of planned roadmap features.
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Partner with Staff and Principal Engineers and the EVP of Production Engineering on architecture, security, DevSecOps, reliability, observability, testing, CI/CD, and transition from prototypes to supported products.
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Support capture, estimation, staffing, customer technical exchanges, program reviews, and lightweight engineering governance for new and existing opportunities.
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Monitor organizational health, workload, and leadership capacity; provide the CPTO with decision-ready recommendations and continuously improve engineering practices, including secure AI-assisted development.
Qualifications
Required
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10+ years of progressive software engineering experience delivering production systems, including 5+ years of formal people management or engineering leadership.
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The stated experience and education requirements describe the typical path to this level and are not a gate. Knowmadics will consider an equivalent combination of education, professional experience, and demonstrated skill, and makes exceptions for candidates who can evidence the scope, complexity, and judgment the role requires.
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Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
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Experience leading multiple teams or an engineering organization of approximately 15 or more people through direct and indirect reports, including senior technical staff.
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Strong hands-on engineering judgment across distributed systems, APIs, data flows, containers, cloud or edge deployment, CI/CD, and secure software delivery; able to review designs and code and lead incident investigation.
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Proven success hiring, coaching, evaluating, and retaining engineers; managing staffing across matrixed efforts; and operating Jira or a comparable platform for backlog quality, dependencies, forecasting, and delivery flow.
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Strong communication and judgment when balancing product, customer, security, reliability, and organizational tradeoffs in mission-critical or regulated environments.
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Eligible to obtain a U.S. Security Clearance - U.S. Citizenship required
Strongly Preferred
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Experience with DoD software delivery, ATO processes, DevSecOps, or secure software supply chains.
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Experience in a startup or scale-up environment with matrixed teams, platform or reliability engineering, developer-experience investments, or governed AI-assisted software development.
Working conditions
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Employees may be called upon to participate in in-person meetings, trainings, or company functions at Knowmadics offices or other designated locations. Travel in support of business operations may also be required, and employees are expected to comply with these obligations as part of their position.
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Remote, with preference given to candidates located within approximately 40 miles of Wichita, KS; Lawton, OK; or Round Rock, TX. Relocation assistance may be negotiable for the right candidate.
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Estimated travel: 10-15 percent for customer meetings, government program reviews, demonstrations, exercises, industry events, partner engagements, and in-person collaboration.
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Some weekend or off-hours work may be required to support deployments, exercise windows, customer demonstrations, incident response, or operational deadlines.
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Standard business hours with flexibility to support distributed teams and customers across U.S. time zones.
Physical requirements
May include sitting or standing for extended periods, working with computers and technical equipment, occasional lifting or moving of materials and equipment up to 35 lbs, and travel to field, range, or demonstration environments where conditions may include outdoor weather, noise, and the operational tempo typical of defense exercises.
Direct reports
Expected to include approximately six to ten Senior Engineers, Staff Engineers, or Engineering Leads, plus selected software engineering individual contributors transferred from existing reporting lines. The role carries managerial accountability for an overall software engineering organization of roughly 20 to 25 people through direct and indirect reports. Span of control is expected to grow toward the upper end of this range as the organization scales and additional Engineering Leads are established; sustained spans above ten are treated as a signal to split the team rather than as a steady state. Final reporting assignments will be calibrated with the CPTO and HR as the organization is implemented.
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Experience with DoD software delivery, ATO processes, DevSecOps, or secure software supply chains.
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Experience in a startup or scale-up environment with matrixed teams, platform or reliability engineering, developer-experience investments, or governed AI-assisted software development.
All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or protected veteran status.
