Engineering Lead

About the Role

We are hiring an engineering leader to build an organization that delivers monthly production releases with zero escaped critical defects. This role leads multiple cross-functional development teams modernizing a federal home loan benefit platform while sustaining the 20-year-old system it replaces.

What You'll Own

• The engineering organization — lead multiple cross-functional development teams across modern and legacy platforms, flexing team size and composition as work flows through intake
• Delivery commitments — commit to scope, level of effort, and timelines in executable plans, then hit them; when you cannot, say so early with a recovery plan
• A quality system, not a QA gate — engineer quality into how teams work, with definition of done that includes full automated testing, code review that catches problems, and metrics that surface risk early
• Test automation as a craft — build the discipline where every feature ships with complete positive and negative automated coverage, and the regression suite becomes the safety net the customer trusts
• The monthly release drumbeat — production value ships every 30 days or faster, release after release, without burning the team down
• Dual-stack engineering — run modern configuration-first platform development and legacy sustainment side by side, including warranty on everything your teams release
• Engineering standards that outlast you — set and enforce the bar for code quality, review, documentation, and definition of done across every team; keep documentation current with every release
• AI-native development at team scale — make AI-assisted engineering the norm across your organization, holding AI-assisted work to the same zero-escaped-defect bar as everything else
• The talent engine — hire deliberately, grow engineers visibly, retain the strong ones, and raise the bar with every addition

AI-Native Engineering at Team Scale

We are looking for someone who already uses tools like Claude Code, Cursor, or GitHub Copilot in their own work, and who has begun leading teams through the shift: establishing standards for responsible AI-assisted development, using AI to expand automated test coverage and accelerate code review, applying it to defect analysis and documentation, and measuring whether it actually improved throughput and quality. AI-generated code is your teams' code — it gets the same review, testing, and ownership as anything an engineer typed by hand. You set that culture. Boundaries are non-negotiable: federal environments govern what tools may touch government code, systems, and data. Use AI wherever it creates leverage, and understand the security, data, privacy, and authorization boundaries governing where and how it can be used.

What Great Looks Like Twelve Months In

• The cadence held — production value shipped at least monthly, every month, with zero escaped critical defects and a team that is energized rather than exhausted
• The regression suite earned trust — automated coverage is complete enough that UAT focuses on new features, and the customer stopped asking whether old functionality still works
• Quality metrics are boring in the best way — detection rates above 95%, critical fixes inside three days, and defect trends the customer reviews without concern
• Teams flex without drama — work moves from intake to a staffed, productive team quickly, and re-forming teams around new work stopped being disruptive
• AI lifted the organization measurably — throughput and coverage improved with AI-assisted engineering, defect rates did not, and your standards for responsible use became the program's standards
• Both stacks are healthy — legacy sustainment is quiet and predictable while modern platform velocity grows quarter over quarter
• The bench is stronger — engineers you hired and grew are visibly better, your leads lead, and departures are rare and regretted
• The customer asks for more — delivery confidence earned the program expanded scope

What You Bring

• A multi-team delivery record — you have led engineering organizations of multiple teams building and shipping production software, and can walk through delivery and quality outcomes with numbers
• Hands-on credibility — you still read code, review designs, and go deep when it matters; engineers respect your technical judgment
• A quality system you built — you have taken an organization to measurably low defect escape rates through engineering discipline and test automation, not through more manual QA at the end
• Federal delivery experience — you have shipped software inside a regulated federal environment and treat security, accessibility, authorization, and documentation requirements as delivery constraints to engineer within
• Metrics fluency — you run engineering organizations on evidence: release cadence, defect detection and escape rates, cycle times, automation coverage, and use those numbers to improve the system
• AI-forward leadership — you use AI engineering tools yourself and have led teams into using them well, with standards, measurement, and accountability
• Customer-facing composure — you present delivery status, defend engineering decisions with evidence, deliver bad news early, and challenge unrealistic direction respectfully
• Talent judgment — you hire well, grow engineers deliberately, and make hard calls about performance without outsourcing them to HR processes
• U.S.-based, and able to obtain and maintain a federal Public Trust clearance

We do not screen on degrees or year counts. If your evidence is strong, we want to talk.

Helpful, Not Required

• Salesforce delivery leadership, or leadership of teams on a comparable configuration-first enterprise platform
• Deep background in test automation frameworks and strategy
• Experience running legacy sustainment and modernization in parallel, or decommissioning a production system
• Familiarity with 508 accessibility compliance in delivery

Leadership Expectations

This is an organizational leadership role with a hands-on soul. You own outcomes across multiple teams, which means your leverage comes through leads, standards, and systems rather than personal output. But you stay close enough to the work to know when a design is wrong, an estimate is padded, or a team is quietly drowning. Engineers should experience you as a leader who understands what they do, because you can still do it. You work directly with federal customers and decision-makers. You present delivery status with candor, defend your teams' engineering decisions with evidence, and challenge poor technical or program direction respectfully. Silent disagreement is a failure mode here, and so is shielding the customer from bad news until it becomes a crisis. You develop the leaders under you deliberately, and you hold the engineering bar even when the schedule argues against it, because on this program the quality metrics are the schedule.

You'll Probably Love This Role If...

• You are the leader whose teams ship on a rhythm others find implausible, and you can explain exactly which disciplines make it possible
• You think a public, measured quality bar is a gift, because it settles arguments that consume other organizations
• You would rather build a delivery machine than inherit one
• You like customers in the room
• You are genuinely energized by leading engineers through the AI shift, because you have seen what it does for a team that adopts it seriously

This May Not Be the Role for You If...

• You lead from dashboards and status meetings, and stopped engaging with the actual engineering
• You treat quality as the QA team's job rather than an engineering outcome you own
• You negotiate quality bars down when schedules get tight
• You hide delivery risk from customers until it becomes undeniable
• You prefer stable, fixed teams and find flexing around the work disruptive
• You view AI as a novelty rather than an engineering capability your organization must master
• You stopped learning when you became senior

About PhoenixTeam

We are practitioners, not a staffing shop. PhoenixTeam is a woman-owned small business founded and led by housing finance technologists who still do the work. Our teams have spent years embedded inside federal housing programs, from loan guaranty to rural housing lending to mortgage insurance.