Software Engineering Manager

The Mission
At Kestrel, we are building the future of scalable autonomy across domains. Our systems enable commercial and national security customers to sense and act in support of complex missions without significant autonomous system expertise. This technology bridges domains (e.g., space, air, land, sea) and fields (e.g., AI, orbital dynamics, geospatial), so it requires a team with both breadth and depth in these related topics.

The Role
As an Engineering Manager at Kestrel, you will lead a team of software engineers who build our data processing pipelines, APIs, agentic AI architecture, infrastructure, and user interfaces. You will hire and develop engineers, set delivery priorities, and keep the team focused on shipping reliable software that meets customer mission needs. You will stay close enough to the technology to guide architecture decisions and unblock the team. This role requires sound judgment, strong communication, and a deep respect for the mission.

Core Responsibilities:

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of software engineers through regular one-on-ones, clear expectations, and career development plans.
• Recruit and hire engineers who bring both technical depth and alignment with Kestrel’s mission and culture.
• Plan and manage the team’s work, including sprint planning, roadmap execution, and delivery against customer and program milestones.
• Partner with product, business development, and company leadership to translate customer mission needs into clear engineering priorities.
• Guide architecture and design decisions across Python-based services, data pipelines, cloud infrastructure, and agentic AI components.
• Establish and enforce engineering best practices, such as code review standards, testing, CI/CD, documentation, and incident response.
• Ensure the team builds compliance-ready systems that support future AWS GovCloud and DoD IL deployments.
• Coordinate engineering support for pilots, demos, customer site visits, and proposal technical volumes.
• Identify and mitigate technical, schedule, and staffing risks early, and communicate tradeoffs clearly to leadership.
• Track team health and delivery metrics, and continuously improve how the team works.

Required Qualifications:

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including at least 2 years of direct people management.
• A track record of leading teams that ship production software on schedule.
• Hands-on experience with Python, API development, distributed or service-oriented systems, and cloud environments (preferably AWS).
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain technical tradeoffs to nontechnical stakeholders.

Bonus:

• Experience leading engineering teams that support DoD or IC programs.
• Familiarity with AWS GovCloud, DoD IL requirements, or the Risk Management Framework (RMF).
• Experience with geospatial data, ISR systems, or agentic AI architectures.
• Experience scaling an engineering team at a startup or venture-backed company.
• Location near Colorado Springs, CO, or Washington, DC (with work at customer sites in Crystal City, VA, and Herndon, VA).
• Active Top Secret // Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS//SCI) clearance with a counterintelligence-scope polygraph (CSP) or full-scope polygraph (FSP).

Must be a US Citizen.