Vice President Defense and Intelligence Engineering

Location: Denver, Colorado, United States; hybrid work required with three days per week in the Denver office

Salary: $257,300–$321,600 USD annual US national range; additional incentive compensation may include bonus and equity

Company

hirify.global designs, builds, and operates a large constellation of imaging satellites and delivers satellite data through a cloud-based platform for commercial, environmental, humanitarian, defense, and intelligence use cases.

What you will do

• Lead, mentor, and scale multidisciplinary engineering teams across software, data and machine learning, platform, infrastructure, analytics, and forward-deployed engineering.
• Own the architecture, systems development, and operational delivery of dual-use products including Global Monitoring Service, Marine Domain Awareness, automated change detection feeds, and agentic workflows.
• Define technical standards, data models, and architectures for high-throughput geospatial analytics, real-time alerting, and automated detection platforms.
• Partner with Product Management, Core Platform Engineering, and executive leadership to convert defense mission requirements into roadmaps, system designs, and delivery plans.
• Direct the integration of machine learning models, analytics, and agentic workflows into the product stack.
• Drive reliability, low-latency processing, system availability, performance SLAs, and secure cloud deployments across commercial and sovereign environments.

Requirements

• 15+ years of software engineering and systems architecture experience, including high-scale data, computer vision, or geospatial applications.
• 8+ years leading and scaling multidisciplinary engineering organizations.
• Experience managing engineering teams, software build pipelines, and data handling governed by ITAR and EAR requirements.
• Experience architecting, building, and operating end-to-end dual-use or defense software applications at scale.
• Active high-level government security clearance or eligibility to obtain top-secret clearance upon hire.
• Expertise in distributed cloud architectures, high-throughput data processing, API infrastructure, machine learning integration, operational metrics, and high availability.

Nice to have

• Master’s degree or Ph.D. in computer science, software engineering, machine learning, or a related discipline.
• Experience building foundation models for remote sensing, agentic platforms, or automated tip-and-cue execution loops.
• Experience with secure government environments, air-gapped systems, sovereign clouds such as AWS GovCloud or C2S, and multi-sensor data fusion involving optical imagery and SAR.

Culture & Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision plans with a health savings account and company contribution.
• Paid time off, holidays, company-wide days off, and 16 weeks of paid parental leave.
• Wellness and employee assistance programs.
• Home office, phone, internet, and commuter reimbursements where applicable.
• Tuition reimbursement, LinkedIn Learning access, equity, and paid volunteer time off.

Hiring process

• Selected interviews may be recorded with candidate consent using an AI notetaking tool, with the option to opt out.
• AI tools are prohibited during live interviews and assessments unless explicitly permitted or required as an accommodation.