[Hiring] Director, Application Developer @L3Harris Technologies

Role Description

L3Harris is undertaking one of the largest-scale Data/AI implementations in the defense contracting sector. This multi-year, transformative program is building state-of-the-art AI applications on top of unified data, integrating ~100 legacy systems including:

• Enterprise resource planning (ERP)
• Product lifecycle management (PLM)
• Supply chain
• Finance
• Operations
• Specialized domain systems

The capabilities cover dozens of critical corporate use cases spanning program management, finance, operations, supply chain, engineering, and strategic planning.

The Director of Applications Development is a key senior leader role foundational to the program's success. The development organization will build sophisticated data pipelines, applications, workflows, and AI models that operate at enterprise scale while maintaining security, compliance, and operational excellence in the regulated defense environment.

Essential Functions:

• Build and lead the development organization that delivers all data pipelines, applications, workflows, and AI/ML capabilities for the enterprise Palantir implementation.
• Recruit, hire, and onboard a team of high-caliber, AI-leveraged developers and scrum masters with diverse skill sets (backend, frontend, full-stack, data engineering, DevOps, QA).
• Build a strong software engineering culture emphasizing quality, collaboration, psychological safety, and continuous improvement.
• Create an organizational structure with multiple engineering managers/tech leads who can scale with the team.
• Define and enforce engineering standards covering code quality, testing, code review processes, and documentation requirements.
• Lead design and implementation of data pipelines that integrate 100+ legacy systems into the Palantir platform.
• Establish ML governance frameworks including model versioning, reproducibility, fairness/bias assessment, explainability requirements, and monitoring of model drift.
• Ensure rapid and high-quality execution of applications, workflows, and user experiences on Palantir.
• Establish agile practices (scrum, kanban, or hybrid) that balance speed with quality.
• Provide visibility into development capacity, progress, risks, and dependencies.
• Manage scope, priorities, and trade-offs to optimize program success.
• Track metrics including velocity, quality (defect rate, test coverage), productivity, schedule adherence, and team satisfaction.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree and minimum 15 years of prior relevant experience, or Graduate Degree and a minimum 13 years of prior related experience, or in lieu of a degree, minimum of 19 years of prior related experience.
• Proven track record building and scaling engineering teams from 0 to 25+ engineers.
• Deep expertise across modern software development practices: agile/scrum, CI/CD, code review, testing, and DevOps.
• Experience with large-scale data integration and pipeline development (ETL, data warehousing, streaming systems).
• Demonstrated experience using AI tooling for development and testing and building AI/ML systems.
• Strong operational and program management skills.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.
• Direct experience with Palantir, including knowledge of Palantir's development frameworks.
• Experience managing multiple product teams or squads in a matrix organization with complex dependencies.

Requirements

• Experience in heavily regulated environments (defense, financial services, utilities, healthcare).
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and modern DevOps practices.
• Background in AI and model deployment in production systems.
• Experience with security-focused development practices, including threat modeling and secure coding.

Benefits

• Health and disability insurance
• 401(k) match
• Flexible spending accounts
• EAP
• Education assistance
• Parental leave
• Paid time off
• Company-paid holidays