Software Engineering Manager Jobs in Reston, VA (NOW HIRING)

HITT is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to serve as a founding technical leaderofits new agentic engineering practice. This is a hands-on role for a builder at the top of their craft: an engineer who works fluently with the latest AI development tools and coding agents, has strong, tested opinions about how AI changes the software development lifecycle, and wants to define those patterns from a blank page rather than inherit them.

Reporting to theHeadof Software Engineering, the Principal Software Engineer sets the technical direction for how software gets built at HITT - architecting the practice's first AI-native applications, establishing the platform and paved-road tooling every team will use, and writing production code every day alongside AI coding agents. The software this role ships must earn its place on real jobsites: fast, reliable, and usable in high-velocity, decentralized field environments.

Beyond building, this rolemultipliesothers. The Principal Software Engineer will help recruit engineers into a lean, agile, AI-augmented team and will train HITT's existing developers in AI-enabled methods - through pairing, code review, workshops, and reference implementations - raising the technical bar for the entire practice.

Responsibilities

Agentic Development & Technical Leadership

• Architect and build HITT's first AI-native applications and agentic workflows end to end, writing production code daily alongside AI coding agents

• Define the technical patterns for agentic development at HITT, including agent orchestration, prompt and context engineering, tool and API integrations, retrieval-augmented generation, and human-in-the-loop review

• Establish evaluation, testing, and observability practices that make AI-assisted software trustworthy, secure, and maintainable

• Prototype rapidly to prove value, then harden the winners into reliable products adopted across jobsites and offices

Platform, Tooling & Standards

• Stand up the engineering platform from scratch: repositories, CI/CD pipelines, environments, model access, guardrails, and the AI development toolchain used by every team

• Create paved-road templates, reference implementations, and internal libraries that make the right way theeasy way

• Set and continuously raise the bar for code quality, security, and performance across the practice, in alignment with HITT's zero trust cybersecurity strategy

• Evaluate emerging AI development tools, models, and frameworks, recommending adoption with clear-eyed assessments of capability and risk

Mentorship & Enablement

• Train and coach HITT's existing developers in AI-enabled development methods through pairing, code review, workshops, and internal documentation

• Help recruit engineers to theorganization,interviewfor craft, judgment, and fluency with modern AI-assisted workflows

• Model a culture of experimentation - fail fast and pivot - while managing risk responsibly

Delivery & Collaboration

• Work in lean, agile teams built on small batches, fast feedback, and continuous delivery

• Partner directly with project teams, field staff, and corporate functions to understand problems firsthand and deliver software that works where execution happens in real time

• Communicate architecture decisions and tradeoffs clearly to both engineers and executives, providing transparency on progress, quality, and value delivered

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience; advanced degree a plus

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including experienceoperatingat a staff or principal level and setting technical direction beyond a single team

• Expert, hands-on fluency with AI-assisted and agentic development, including coding agents (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor), LLM APIs, agent frameworks, tool and API integrations, retrieval-augmented generation, and evaluation

• Track recordof shipping production software with modern stacks: cloud-native services, APIs, web and mobile applications, CI/CD, and infrastructure as code

• Demonstrated ability to mentor and upskill other engineers, and to introduce new tools and practices into an existing organization

• Strong architectural judgment, with the range to move between rapid prototyping and hardened production systems

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to make complex technical topics clear to non-technical partners

• Experience building software for field-based or operational users, or in construction, engineering, or manufacturing environments, is a plus