Contract Remote Senior Engineering Manager Jobs in Virginia

Two Six Technologies is seeking a hands-on Engineering Leader to manage the team responsible for Trusted Keep, our zero trust data security product protecting some of the most sensitive information in the federal government. Trusted Keep gives organizations a single, unified way to lock down data wherever it lives, whether on-premise or across multiple clouds, so that only authorized people and systems can ever reach that data. Trusted Keep replaces the patchwork of point security tools organizations rely on today with one proven system that's been protecting national security missions around the clock for years. This role has a dual focus on people leadership and technical contribution. You will coach, mentor, and ensure strong technical execution by the team, while partnering closely with Product leadership to shape and drive the roadmap. You will also stay hands-on as an active senior-level contributor, close enough to the code to lead by example.

This is a remote position with travel a few times a year.  You need to live in the U.S., ideally on the East Coast.

• Leading the team: having regular one on one meetings, coaching, guiding career development, and building a strong team culture centered on collaboration
• Owning team composition: interviews, hiring, and advocating for the team with leadership as needs evolve
• Managing performance and compensation: conducting reviews, delivering feedback, recommending promotions
• Collaborating with Product leadership: shaping the roadmap, estimating and prioritizing work, negotiating scope and timelines, reporting status
• Owning engineering delivery: supporting team through all phases from discovery & design through release, refining and holding team to engineering standards, unblocking work when necessary
• Contributing at a senior level: designing and implementing complex features while helping to raise the engineering skills of other team members
• Partnering with senior engineering leadership: on technical direction, architecture, and championing mature engineering practices (CI/CD, QA discipline, infrastructure-as-code)

• 10+ years of related IT and Engineering experience
• Experience as an Engineering Manager leading a single team of remote and on-site engineers, with both performance and delivery ownership
• Background in systems languages (Go, Rust, Java, C++, or C#) and distributed systems, sufficient to follow technical designs and verify engineering estimates in any of these languages
• A proven track record of shipping quality software on time  
• Experience growing and improving an engineering team without disrupting delivery
• Experience partnering closely with strong senior engineers on technical direction, balancing collaboration and discussion with the need to make decisions and execute
• Experience with Product Engineering and Agile practices, a history of working closely with Product leads

• Go experience 
• Linux systems admin: permissions and mounts, OS-level debugging
• Cloud platform experience
• Infrastructure-as-code tooling (Ansible, Terraform, Terragrunt)
• Security domain experience: HSMs, cryptography, mTLS, PKI, and certificate lifecycle management
• KMS/HSM internals: envelope encryption, key wrapping, key hierarchies, and key lifecycle
• KMIP protocol experience
• OAuth2/OIDC and identity provider integration (e.g., Keycloak)
• WebAuthn/FIDO2
• Policy engines (OPA/Rego)
• Messaging systems (NATS, JetStream)
• Experience managing engineers building for hardened-hardware, on-premise, or non-cloud-native deployments

You are a strong fit for this role if you have led a remote engineering team of similar size before, with real ownership over both performance and delivery. You have a strong, systems-level engineering background (using languages like Go, Rust, Java, C++, or C#), and can lead code reviews and architecture discussions. Experience in security, cryptography, or identity systems is a strong plus, and what matters most is that you can build a high-performing, well-supported team while staying close enough to the technical details to ensure the team is delivering well designed, high quality, and secure solutions.

We write position descriptions to give you the fullest picture we can of what the role entails.  If you are interested in this role but are on the fence about applying because you are uncertain that you meet every single criteria, then we encourage you to still apply.