Engineering Lead

Engineering Lead

Tagup is a defense AI company combining expert knowledge with artificial intelligence to revolutionize military logistics. Tagup's AI software directly controls large-scale industrial equipment and logistics systems, ensuring our customers get the best performance they can. As a rapidly scaling AI/ML technology company, we are looking to expand our team.

We are seeking an Engineering Lead to grow and guide a high-performing team while staying hands-on with the technology. In this role, you'll balance leadership with technical depth — setting direction, mentoring engineers, and contributing directly to the systems and code that power our mission. You'll be central to scaling our product and engineering capabilities, ensuring rapid, reliable, and cost-effective delivery of value to defense and commercial customers.

What You'll Do

• Lead and expand a high-performing engineering team, fostering productivity, morale, and professional growth.
• Stay hands-on, contributing to core codebases, architecture decisions, and technical reviews.
• Accelerate onboarding and deployment to meet customer demand — targeting days for commercial customers and two months for government customers.
• Improve unit economics by reducing the cost of marginal onboarding and support.
• Balance long-term maintainability with rapid delivery to maximize enterprise value.
• Automate repetitive tasks (e.g., data source connections, onboarding, security checks) to scale delivery efficiently.
• Build and refactor extensible data/domain models to minimize per-customer code and maximize knowledge sharing.
• Collaborate with product and cross-functional teams to translate customer feedback into fast, impactful deployments.
• Track and report key metrics such as onboarding time, time to first value, customer satisfaction, and product adoption.
• Partner directly with customers to understand their needs and ensure our products deliver lasting value.

What We're Looking For

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ in leadership roles.
• Proven ability to build and scale engineering teams in high-growth environments.
• Strong expertise in Python, SQL, and cloud-native systems.
• Experience designing extensible, reliable, and scalable architectures.
• Clear communicator with excellent mentorship and cross-functional leadership skills.
• Background in aviation, defense, or logistics software a plus, but not required.
• Track record of improving engineering efficiency through automation, refactoring, and metrics-driven approaches.

The estimated salary range for this position is between $150,000 and $175,000 annually. We strive to provide a competitive salary and benefits package that aligns with our employees' experience and qualifications. Our primary objective is to attract and retain top talent, and we firmly believe in compensating our employees fairly for their invaluable contributions.

As a rapidly expanding technology company, we extend part-ownership to all team members through an Employee Stock Option Plan. Additionally, we offer comprehensive health insurance benefits, access to the company's 401K plan, and foster a team-oriented work environment with regular company outings!

Joining Tagup means becoming part of a fast-growing, mission-driven company at the forefront of defense and aviation innovation. You'll have the chance to work directly with customers performing critical operations, contributing technology that has a tangible impact on national security and global logistics. This role offers both the challenge and the reward of leading in a high-growth environment, where your decisions and leadership will shape not only our technology but also the culture and trajectory of the engineering team. If you want your work to matter on a global scale and to grow alongside a company redefining what's possible with AI, this is the place for you.

Tagup is an equal opportunity employer and individuals seeking employment with us are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by law. Applicants must be authorized to work for ANY employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time.