Director, Software Engineering (AI) Onsite - Reston, VA - Freewheel

What you'll do

• Lead the development and execution of software strategies to align with organizational goals
• Define coding standards and frameworks for application development across various platforms
• Direct a large team in creating innovative software and web applications, while ensuring ongoing support for existing solutions
• Manage the rollout of software releases and updates, ensuring seamless implementation across the organization
• Collaborate with managers to meet project deadlines, specifications, and budgetary constraints, while developing performance metrics
• Report on project progress and manage large-scale budgets to meet financial targets
• Research and integrate new coding technologies and practices to enhance development efficiency
• Partner with other engineering teams to adopt practices that support organizational objectives
• Exercise independent judgment and discretion in matters of significance
• Maintain regular, consistent, and punctual attendance; able to work nights and weekends as necessary
• Create, enable, and drive innovation by bringing agentic workflows and AI capabilities into applications
• Manage and develop engineering teams while working closely with product, data, business, and executive stakeholders
• Define AI engineering strategy and roadmap aligned with business priorities, product opportunities, and customer needs
• Guide teams in design and delivery of AI-enabled product capabilities including intelligent automation and decision-support experiences
• Partner with internal stakeholders and external partners to identify high-value AI opportunities and translate business problems into product improvements
• Drive innovation in AI engineering by evaluating emerging capabilities and scaling successful patterns
• Build strong engineering leadership by hiring, mentoring, and developing high-performing teams
• Develop and manage team priorities, staffing plans, and investment decisions to align AI engineering work with company goals
• Guide issue resolution and share insights on product usage, data quality, AI effectiveness, and opportunities for improvement
• Ensure AI capabilities are delivered responsibly with attention to data sensitivity, privacy, security, and company policies
• Lead adoption of LLMs, machine learning, and agentic capabilities to support product innovation and business value

Requirements

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, including AI/ML systems
• 5+ years managing, mentoring, and developing engineering teams at scale
• Proven experience launching AI-enabled products and bringing LLMs, ML models, agents, or intelligent workflows into production use
• Strong software engineering background, with experience designing scalable backend services and product capabilities using Python, Go, or similar technologies
• Experience enabling AI capabilities in cloud-based product environments, such as Azure, AWS, or GCP
• Strong understanding of how to evaluate, improve, and responsibly operate AI capabilities after launch, with attention to quality, reliability, adoption, and business impact
• Ability to translate business problems into scalable AI-enabled product solutions and guide teams from concept through launch and ongoing improvement
• Bachelor's Degree or equivalent combination of coursework and experience

Tech stack

Benefits