Head of Software Product Development

BRILLIENT CORPORATION • Reston, VA

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

Brillient Corporation is building the next generation of our ALICE® AI‑powered SaaS platform, and we are looking for the engineering leader who will own the outcome. Your background can come from anywhere, consumer apps, gaming, fintech, enterprise SaaS, or gov contracting; what matters is that you have owned a product, grown it, and felt the accountability that comes with that. This is not a project delivery role. You will collaborate to define the product direction, take part in every aspect of ensuring we remain an industry leader, and personally lead the engineering team that brings the vision to life. As Head of Software Product Development, you will report to executive leadership and work closely with our senior architect and team to drive a shared product vision. You must be comfortable making strategic decisions in one moment and jumping into a code review in the next. You lead by doing. Your credibility comes from competence. Your team knows you understand the work because you are in it with them. This is a high visibility, high demand, and high impact role where ability and impacts are more important than time in seat. We will measure you by what you have owned, shipped, and how you did it, not by your years of experience. If you have run a product, see yourself in this description, and have consistently been the strongest engineer in every room, we want to talk. Is This Role for You? You think in terms of products, not projects. You've built something people rely on day after day and you know the differences between evolving a common, flexible, and configurable solution versus the simplicity of a one-off deliverable. You thrive in environments where your impact is visible and direct, where there's no organizational bureaucracy between you and the problem. Titles matter less to you than outcomes. You hold a high bar for engineering quality because you genuinely care what gets shipped. You're high energy, share the moments of success, and are energized by the long game of building something that compounds in capability and value over time. This is a builder's job … hands-on, fast-moving, and deeply accountable for what ships.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent demonstrated technical experience.
• Minimum three (3) to five (5) years of hands-on software development experience; we care far more about the quality and ownership of what you've built than how long you've been building it. Ability and impact are more important than time in seat.
• Meaningful experience leading engineering teams in a product-driven environment. Industry doesn't matter. If you have owned a product and continuously evolved it, that experience is exactly what we're looking for. One-off project delivery is not.
• Deep expertise in cloud-native architecture (AWS and/or GCP), microservices, and API-first design with direct, current build experience.
• Demonstrated experience as a working architect or principal engineer, evidenced by code reviews, architectural authorship, or direct platform ownership.
• Strong background integrating AI/ML capabilities into products, with practical fluency in AI-enabled development tools and agentic workflows.
• US Citizenship required
• Experience with multi-tenant SaaS systems, including subscription-based or consumption-based tracking.

Responsibilities

• Own the multi-quarter engineering roadmap in partnership with leadership, architects and team, balancing new capability delivery with platform health, security, and performance.
• Enrich the product with Brillient’s growing list of Patents and be supported by Brillient in getting even more patents.
• Drive the evolution of a scalable, multi-tenant SaaS platform; leaping forward in capabilities, shedding debt, and making engineering decisions that change the market.
• Establish and track product engineering metrics tied to outcomes: release velocity, uptime, feature adoption, and platform reliability.
• Engage directly with customers and key stakeholders to ensure product development is grounded in user needs and real-world feedback.
• Be hands-on in the work: actively participate in ticket refinement, architecture reviews, code reviews, and sprint ceremonies.
• Champion a servant-leadership model where your job is to remove friction, raise the bar, and help your team do the best work of their careers.
• Lead, mentor, and grow engineering managers and senior developers, fostering a culture of accountability, innovation, and craft.
• Maintain strong engineering standards: architecture documentation, coding practices, security posture, and sustained platform quality.
• Drive adoption of agentic AI capabilities across requirements, design, development, testing, and CI/CD.
• Practice combined ingenuity harvesting the best ideas of leadership, peers, and the team to guide the engineering direction including cloud-native architecture, API-first design, AI/ML integration, and DevOps practices across the full product lifecycle.
• Manage engineering budgets, headcount planning, and resource allocation in support of long-term platform growth.
• Implement KPIs and executive reporting that give the organization clear visibility into team performance and product quality.

Benefits

• Competitive base salary depending on experience and demonstrated impact
• Performance bonus: Substantial and uncapped bonus tied to product and company outcomes
• Potential additional incentives to share in future company outcomes

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Executive