Engineering Lead

What You Bring

• We care about evidence more than resumes. Expect us to ask what your organizations shipped, what your defect and delivery metrics actually were, how you turned around a team that was missing its commitments, and how AI functions across your teams today.
• A multi-team delivery record. You have led engineering organizations of multiple teams building and shipping production software, and you can walk us through the 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, not just your title.
• 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, not excuses for slipping.
• Metrics fluency. You run engineering organizations on evidence: release cadence, defect detection and escape rates, cycle times, automation coverage, and you use those numbers to improve the system rather than to punish people.
• 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, including ours.
• 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.
• Mortgage or housing finance experience is not required. We will teach you the domain.
• 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. And 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...
• We would rather you self-select now than be unhappy in month three. You may struggle here if you:
• Lead from dashboards and status meetings, and stopped engaging with the actual engineering.
• Treat quality as the QA team's job rather than an engineering outcome you own.
• Negotiate quality bars down when schedules get tight.
• Hide delivery risk from customers until it becomes undeniable.
• Prefer stable, fixed teams and find flexing around the work disruptive.
• View AI as a novelty rather than an engineering capability your organization must master.
• Stopped learning when you became senior.
• None of that makes someone a bad leader. It makes them a bad fit for this particular job.
• Why 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. You will build your organization alongside leaders who have shipped, not above account managers who have not.
• Your leadership has visible consequences. Delivery cadence, quality, and reliability are measured monthly and reviewed by the customer. The organization you build performs in public.
• Direct customer access. You work with federal decision-makers yourself. Your judgment reaches the people who act on it, without three layers of translation in between.
• You build the machine. You are establishing how engineering delivery works on this program, not maintaining someone else's operating model.
• AI-native is practice, not positioning. AI is part of how PhoenixTeam delivers, and we fund ongoing AI education and development for the entire team. In this role you will scale that investment across an organization, not fight for permission to use it.
• Fully remote,S.-based, permanently.
• Competitive salary and 100% employer-paid medical insurance.
• Mission you can explain at dinner. The software your teams ship supports a home loan benefit for the people who served this country.
• Position Requirements
• Full-time W-2 employment with PhoenixTeam.
• Must be based in the United States.
• Fully remote.
• Work supports a federal civilian agency.
• Must be able to obtain and maintain the required federal Public Trust clearance. A Secret clearance is not required.
• PhoenixTeam is a woman-owned small business focused on federal and commercial housing finance technology.