Manager, Software Engineering (Collection)

In today's digital landscape, OSINT (open-source intelligence) tools have become indispensable for understanding global dynamics and informing critical decisions. The Ukraine-Russia conflict has demonstrated the power of OSINT in providing real-time insights into military movements, disinformation campaigns, and humanitarian crises, often outpacing traditional intelligence gathering methods. Similarly, as global competition with China intensifies, OSINT collection offers valuable perspectives on technological advancements, economic strategies, and geopolitical maneuvers. In the Middle East, where regional tensions and rapid sociopolitical changes are constant, OSINT plays a crucial role in monitoring extremist activities. The ability to efficiently collect, process, and analyze this vast sea of open-source data has become a cornerstone of modern intelligence.

About The Role

We're looking for a talented Software Engineering Manager to lead our social collection platform engineering team, specializing in data collection and processing to support OSINT (open-source intelligence) workflows in the US DoD. You'll be tasked with building and leading a mid-sized team that focuses on gathering and leveraging publicly available data. This team plays a crucial role in powering Decrypt, Vannevar Labs' flagship product, while also supporting new product initiatives. Your team will be responsible for our core collection platform, which handles large-scale web traffic processing with a strong emphasis on operational security and managed attribution.

What You’ll Do

• Team Building: Develop and lead a strong cross-functional team focused on data collection and exploitation to power all VL products.
• Data Product Development: Design and build scalable, reliable data-intensive applications for collecting and warehousing publicly available information.
• Technology Improvement: Identify opportunities for automation and enhancement of our core data collection platform from various online sources.
• Collaboration: Work closely with engineers, product engineering teams and mission success, leveraging your communication skills to ensure effective teamwork.

What we look for

• Proven experience in engineering leadership roles, either as a tech lead or engineering manager.
• Strong technical expertise in building ETL pipelines and designing APIs.
• Ability to build and scale creative solutions to challenging data access and collection problems
• Understanding of managed attribution and operational security best practices.
• High ethical standards for handling sensitive data, ensuring adherence to data privacy rules and compliance standards.
• Willingness to travel up to offsite and team syncs ~4 weeks per year
• Excellent communication skills, teamwork abilities, and project ownership.
• U.S. Citizenship (required to access U.S.-only data systems).
• Experience in data scraping or a strong desire to learn.
• Proficiency coding with Python, or similar
• Proficiency with PostgreSQL, or other relational databases.
• Proficiency with software development in AWS or other cloud services.
• Familiarity with Temporal.io or similar technologies.

What we offer

We’re proud to offer competitive benefits that support our employees. Some key highlights of our benefits package include:

• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• 100% remote first culture. You can work from anywhere in the US and all full time employees have WeWork access
• Unlimited PTO including competitive vacation and holiday schedules
• Lifestyle stipends - Monthly mental health, wellness & fitness stipend, in-home office setup stipend and family planning assistance
• Salary top-up during military reserve duty
• Fully paid parental leave
• Child and pet care reimbursement during travel