Director of Engineering - A&D

Job Description

About our Aerospace & Defense business

Our Aerospace & Defense business helps the world’s leading airlines, MROs, OEMs and defense operators keep complex fleets and platforms mission-ready — managing the full maintenance, asset and service lifecycle at scale. We are reimagining how that software is built and delivered around AI, and we are investing in engineering leaders who can put AI to work both inside our products and in how we build them.

About the role

As Director of Engineering for our Defense solutions, you lead the engineering teams that build software for the U.S. defense operators who keep their fleets and platforms mission-ready. You are an engineer first and a people manager second, and we mean both halves. This is a player-coach role: you carry the technical depth of a Principal Engineer or Architect, you guide architectural decisions and set the technical bar, and you take direct responsibility for hiring, developing and retaining the engineers on your teams.

Your teams are autonomous and own the full delivery lifecycle — design, development, testing, deployment and operations — with a you-build-it, you-run-it mindset. You make sure they have the clarity, context and conditions to deliver great work, in a domain where reliability, security and compliance are not optional. You stay close to the work: you join design reviews, weigh architectural trade-offs, unblock hard technical problems, and use the same engineering practices and AI tools your teams use every day.

AI fluency is central. You will drive AI adoption across your teams, from AI-assisted development workflows that accelerate delivery to AI-powered product capabilities that create customer value. This is not about hype. It is about making AI a practical, embedded part of how your teams work and what they ship, including in environments with strict data-handling and deployment constraints.

This is not a role for managers who have left the code behind.

What you’ll do

• Lead and grow engineers. Hire, onboard, coach and develop software engineers across the full career ladder, from associate through senior lead. You measure your success by the growth and output of your teams.
• Be the technical leader. Participate in architecture reviews, guide technology choices, and set the technical bar for the Defense solutions portfolio. You can read, review and reason about production code, and your engineers trust your judgment because you have earned it.
• Own delivery outcomes. Ensure your teams deliver high-quality software at a sustainable pace, balancing technical quality with business and mission value.
• Drive engineering excellence. Ensure teams follow modern practices: CI/CD, automated testing, observability, infrastructure as code and secure-by-default design, including the supply chain, hardening and accreditation expectations of defense customers.
• Champion AI fluency. Drive adoption of AI-assisted development across your teams. Make sure your engineers can build and validate AI-powered product features, from retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agentic architectures to evaluation harnesses, and foster a culture where AI is a practical tool with responsible guardrails.
• Remove obstacles. Resolve cross-team dependencies, shield teams from organizational noise, and keep engineers focused on what matters.
• Partner across the business. Work closely with Product Management, Design, Architecture and senior leadership to align technical execution with product strategy, and engage directly with defense customers in technical discussions, workshops and co-creation.
• Shape engineering culture. Foster continuous learning, healthy debate and ownership. Help engineers find and grow deep specialisms such as front-end, back-end, data engineering, applied AI, platform and SRE, and security.

What you’ll bring

Essential

• Technical depth: significant experience in software engineering, with a track record of operating at Principal Engineer or Architect level — system design, cross-team architectural thinking and technology strategy.
• People leadership: proven experience managing and developing engineering teams, including hiring, performance management and career development, with a coaching mindset.
• Modern engineering foundations: strong hands-on background in cloud-native architectures, microservices, API-first design, CI/CD, containerization and infrastructure as code, and proficiency in one or more modern languages (e.g., Go, Python, Java, C#, TypeScript).
• AI fluency: hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools, an understanding of AI/ML integration patterns (RAG, agents, prompt engineering, evaluation), and a track record of driving AI adoption within engineering teams.
• Full-lifecycle ownership: experience leading teams that own development, testing, deployment and production operations.
• Communication: the ability to explain technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and to translate business and mission needs into engineering direction.
• Eligibility: based in the United States and able to meet the eligibility requirements for U.S. defense work for this requisition.

Nice to have

• Experience delivering software to defense, government or other regulated customers, including security accreditation, restricted or disconnected networks, and controlled-data handling.
• Experience in enterprise software or SaaS product development at scale.
• Experience building or leading teams that ship AI-powered product capabilities — MLOps pipelines, AI safety and governance practices, or AI evaluation frameworks.
• Experience working in or with Aerospace & Defense organizations, or on solutions for asset, maintenance, MRO or fleet-readiness management.
• Background across multiple engineering disciplines (e.g., front-end and back-end, or platform and application development).
• Experience with event-driven architectures, message brokers and streaming platforms.
• Track record of modernizing legacy systems or migrating to cloud-native architectures.
• Familiarity with security practices (OWASP, threat modeling, security tooling in CI/CD).
• Experience with organizational design — team structures, team topologies and scaling engineering organizations.

Qualifications

What we’re looking for in you

• You are technically deep, and your ambition is to multiply the impact of others, not just your own.
• You lead with context, not control. You set direction and trust your teams to execute.
• You are comfortable with healthy tension and constructive debate, and you optimize for better decisions rather than comfortable meetings.
• You are AI-native. You use AI tools in your own work and are energized by helping others do the same.
• You stay curious and expect the same from your teams.
• You have grit. You navigate ambiguity, remove blockers and keep teams moving forward.

Additional Information

We embrace flexibility and hybrid work opportunities to support diverse needs and lifestyles, while also valuing inclusive workplace experiences. By fostering a sense of community, we drive innovation, strengthen connections, and nurture belonging. Our commitment ensures you can work in a way that suits you best, while also engaging with colleagues to share ideas and build meaningful relationships.

Additional Information

What We’re Offering

• Flexible paid time off, including sick and holiday
• Medical, dental, & vision insurance
• 401K with Company contribution
• Flexible spending accounts
• Life insurance and disability benefits
• Tuition assistance
• Community involvement and volunteering events

M/F/Disabled/Vet VEVRAA Federal Contractor. We are a Drug-Free Workplace. Interested candidates should apply at: www.ifs.com/about/careers-at-ifs

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