- Robot type
- Defense
- Location
- El SegundoCaliforniaUSA
- Job type
- Software
- Posted
- Jun 8, 2026
- Salary
- $220,000–$270,000 a year
Full-time
Head of Software
Job description
Picogrid is a leading venture-backed defense technology company founded to bridge the decades-long gap between modern technology and the critical demands of national security. Today, we're building the essential infrastructure to unify sensors, autonomy, and operators with our technology deployed in active operations around the world. Our mission is to deliver an operational advantage to secure the United States and its allies.
Job responsibilities
- Lead the team's growth, people management, and strategic planning across all layers of the Picogrid software stack.
- Collaborate with the CTO, the Lead Software Engineer, Product Owners, and Engineering Managers to produce plans and strategy to handle the product and customer development goals.
- Act as the primary interface between Software Engineering and all other functions (Go-To-Market, Hardware, and Operations) ensuring software delivers real operational impact for users in the field.
- Represent the company in external conversations with strategic partners and customers.
- Participate in yearly, quarterly, and monthly planning cycles. Contribute to the development of the product roadmap.
- As the founding leader of the Software Engineering Department, you will hire, mentor, and build a high-performing team of engineers across backend, frontend, and platform disciplines.
- Successfully grow a fully operational Software Engineering Department, deliver the next generation of our platform and operator products, and establish the technical infrastructure for long-term mission success.
Job requirements
- 8+ years of progressive software engineering experience, with significant time in a hands-on technical lead, principal, or director-level role.
- Preferred: past founding or early-stage fast-growth startup experience.
- Strong inter-personal skills and demonstrated ability to grow people.
- Ability to operate with clarity and urgency in the managed chaos of a rapidly growing startup.
- Expert-level proficiency across the full generalist software skillset, spanning backend systems, event-based architecture, distributed architecture, APIs (REST, gRPC, GraphQL), real-time data pipelines, and production…
- Deep familiarity with modern languages and runtimes used in production: Go, Python, and TypeScript.
- Strong grasp of relational databases (PostgreSQL), object storage, geospatial tooling, and high-reliability deployment patterns.
- Meaningful experience leading both backend platform work and frontend/UI development for complex, data-intensive applications.