Engineering Manager, DevOps

Vannevar is a defense technology company building AI to deter our adversaries. In the 21st century, conflict moves at algorithmic speed and foresight equals firepower. Our agentic AI is purpose-built to compete with China—from cross-Strait conflict to gray zone coercion. Trained on the most mission-relevant datasets in defense, our technology models adversary behavior, simulates campaigns, and recommends the best course of action to decision makers. Our AI systems are some of the most trusted in the industry and actively used on the front lines of the Indo-Pacific to keep the peace and save lives. Exceptional technology starts with exceptional people. Vannevar is a small agile team combining world-class engineers with veteran strategists who bring deep expertise in defense and tradecraft. We’re building a company defined by mission impact, user empathy, and disciplined growth. In just three years, we grew from $3M to $80M in ARR, achieved early profitability, and reached unicorn status—proving that disruption doesn’t require an ego, and staying power doesn’t mean standing still. About the role: Our DevOps function is a critical enabler of platform reliability, developer velocity, and secure delivery. We’re seeking a DevOps Engineering Manager to lead a team responsible for the systems and practices that power build, deploy, observability, and operational excellence. In this role, you’ll set technical direction, grow a high-performing team, and partner across Engineering, Security, and Product to deliver secure, scalable infrastructure and tooling. What you’ll do: Lead and develop a DevOps team: Hire, mentor, and grow engineers; set clear expectations and create an environment of ownership, high standards, and continuous improvement. Drive platform reliability: Own the health of CI/CD, deployment, and runtime infrastructure; improve availability, performance, and incident response through measurable SLOs and operational rigor. Build self-service and automation: Create developer-facing tooling to reduce toil (golden paths, paved roads, templates, and automation for common workflows). Evolve CI/CD and release engineering: Improve build and deploy pipelines, change management, release safety (progressive delivery, rollbacks), and supply-chain security. Observability and monitoring: Implement and mature logging, metrics, and alerting; build dashboards and guardrails that help teams understand and improve system behavior. Infrastructure as code: Standardize and scale infrastructure management using modern IaC patterns and review/approval workflows. Security and compliance partnership: Work closely with Security and compliance stakeholders to deliver secure-by-default systems and audit-ready practices. Cross-functional collaboration: Partner with application teams to improve deployability and operability, and translate business priorities into an executable roadmap. What we’re looking for: Engineering management experience: 3+ years leading and developing software engineers, including coaching, performance management, hiring, and building healthy team practices. Deep hands-on background: 8+ years of experience as an individual contributor in DevOps/SRE/platform/infrastructure or software engineering roles. Cloud and systems expertise: Strong experience operating production systems in a major cloud environment (AWS preferred) and building for reliability and scale. CI/CD and automation: Proven experience designing and operating modern build and deploy pipelines and automating operational workflows. Observability: Experience with logging/metrics/alerting stacks (e.g., Datadog, Grafana, CloudWatch, ELK/OpenSearch) and using them to drive reliability improvements. Infrastructure as code: Experience with Terraform, Pulumi, or equivalent tools and associated engineering practices (code review, testing, drift detection). Containers and runtime: Familiarity with containerization and orchestration (Docker; Kubernetes/ECS preferred). Strong co