Engineering Manager, Security Platform

Vannevar builds AI systems for the Department of War's most consequential missions. We have 125 deployments across every branch and combatant command spanning our core platform and five distinct products. An an example of how we work, when major combat operations started with Iran, we fielded a new product supporting 24/7 operations and 9,000+ users in three months.

How we build is our advantage: we deploy forward with the people who own the mission. Our engineers, product team, and CTO deploy forward to the point of friction, including visiting units in Ukraine. We focus on embedding directly with operational units supporting great power competition with China, combat operations with Iran, and counter-narcotics missions.

About the role

Secure access is a critical enabler of Vannevar’s mission. We are seeking an Engineering Manager to lead the Security Platform team and drive the strategy, execution, and evolution of the systems that govern authentication, authorization, and access management across our products. In this role, you will lead a team responsible for centralized identity and access infrastructure, including IdP integrations, authorization policy frameworks, SSO capabilities, and access management tooling.

Working closely with engineering, mission, and product partners, you will build secure-by-default platforms that reduce friction for developers, provide clarity and control for administrators, and ensure end users can access only the resources they are authorized to see.

What you’ll do

• Team leadership: Grow and mentor a high-performing team of engineers. Foster a strong engineering culture focused on security, reliability, ownership, and delivering high-impact platform capabilities.
• Strategy and technical direction: Define the roadmap and technical vision for authentication, authorization, and access management capabilities, ensuring Vannevar’s identity platform scales securely and reliably with the business.
• Platform and developer enablement: Lead the development of centralized identity and access services—including IdP integrations, authorization infrastructure, and SSO capabilities—that reduce friction for product teams and enable secure-by-default development.
• Cross-functional execution: Partner with Product, Mission, Infrastructure, and Engineering teams to deliver foundational identity and access capabilities that balance security, usability, and operational excellence.
• Organizational impact: Drive adoption of access control standards, security best practices, and platform capabilities across engineering teams to create a consistent and trustworthy access experience throughout Vannevar.

What we’re looking for

• Engineering leadership: 3+ years of experience leading and developing high-performing software engineering teams, with a track record of delivering complex technical initiatives and growing engineers.
• Identity and access expertise: Strong understanding of authentication, authorization, access control, and secure system design, with experience building or operating identity, security, or platform infrastructure.
• Distributed systems experience: 8+ years of software engineering experience building and operating scalable, reliable distributed systems that serve as critical infrastructure for engineering organizations.
• Product and customer mindset: Demonstrated ability to partner closely with product, engineering, and operational stakeholders to deliver solutions that balance customer needs, business priorities, and technical excellence.
• Judgment and execution: Proven ability to lead through ambiguity and make sound tradeoffs between security, reliability, developer experience, and delivery velocity.
• Communication and influence: Excellent communication skills and a track record of driving alignment across teams, influencing technical direction, and building strong cross-functional partnerships.

What we value

Active security clearance or ability/willingness to obtain one.

Prior experience building software for defense, national security or intelligence use cases.

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
• Remote friendly with WeWork access
• Unlimited PTO, shared downtime during the federal holiday calendar, and company-wide off time at the end of each year
• 401(k) match
• Lifestyle & wellbeing stipends