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

About the role

This job guides AI engineering strategy and product innovation, overseeing the design and delivery of AI-enabled capabilities, agentic workflows, and intelligent automation across FreeWheel’s applications. It ensures AI capabilities are launched responsibly into production with attention to quality, reliability, adoption, compliance, and measurable business impact. The role manages and develops engineering teams, aligns product, data, business, and executive stakeholders, and directs priorities and investments to deliver on FreeWheel’s build-in and built-on AI vision.

Responsibilities

• Leading the development and execution of software strategies to align with organizational goals
• Defining coding standards and frameworks for application development across various platforms
• Directing a large team in creating innovative software and web applications, while ensuring ongoing support for existing solutions
• Managing the rollout of software releases and updates, ensuring seamless implementation across the organization
• Collaborating with managers to meet project deadlines, specifications, and budgetary constraints, while developing performance metrics
• Reporting on project progress and managing large-scale budgets to meet financial targets
• Researching and integrating new coding technologies and practices to enhance development efficiency
• Prioritizing and staffing teams to align AI engineering work with company goals and product outcomes
• Guiding issue resolution and sharing insights on product usage, data quality, AI effectiveness, and opportunities to improve business and customer outcomes
• Ensuring AI capabilities are delivered responsibly, with appropriate attention to data sensitivity, customer privacy, security expectations, and company policies
• Partnering with internal stakeholders and external partners to identify high-value AI opportunities, clarify business problems, and turn them into practical product and workflow improvements
• Driving innovation in AI engineering by helping teams evaluate emerging capabilities, apply them to real business needs, and scale successful patterns across the organization
• Building strong engineering leadership by hiring, mentoring, and developing high-performing teams that can deliver reliable, maintainable, and customer-focused AI capabilities

Qualifications

• 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