Top Tech Jobs & Startup Jobs in Chicago, IL

Owns high-impact business operations and strategic initiatives across customer delivery, commercial operations, business systems, talent strategy, and growth areas. Builds scalable processes, tools, and AI-enabled workflows; improves delivery and cost structures; partners with executives and cross-functional teams; develops hiring strategies for specialized talent; and leads special projects in a fast-growing defense technology company.

Design, build, and improve scalable backend systems that collect hard-to-access OSINT; build pipelines and ETL for messy data; collaborate with product and mission teams; mentor engineers and ensure reliable data delivery for DoD workflows.

Build and scale backend security platform services, including authentication, authorization, identity infrastructure, permission systems, and data models. Lead cross-team technical initiatives, standardize security solutions, collaborate with compliance and mission stakeholders, and influence architecture and engineering standards. The role requires strong system design, backend development, security expertise, technical leadership, and the ability to operate in sensitive environments.

Conduct full-lifecycle recruiting for technical and engineering roles, emphasizing creative sourcing of senior talent. Partner with hiring managers to define requirements and interview processes, improve recruiting workflows, manage multiple candidate pipelines, and deliver an excellent candidate experience. The role requires recruiting experience in technology startups and defense or adjacent industries, along with strong sourcing and process-management skills.

Manage federal government contracts from pre-award activities through closeout, maintaining registrations, reporting, disclosures, contract files, compliance workflows, and performance monitoring. Support negotiations and administration of customer, subcontractor, and vendor agreements. Develop policies addressing FAR, DFARS, export control, OFAC, and subcontract requirements while collaborating across legal, finance, revenue, and capture teams. Build AI-enabled processes, respond to contract inquiries, and identify performance risks.

Build and scale application security for a SaaS platform by integrating SAST, SCA, DAST, secrets scanning, and container/IaC checks into CI/CD. Partner with engineering and DevOps teams on threat modeling, secure code reviews, vulnerability remediation, incident response, and secure development practices. The role also supports compliance goals and translates security risks clearly to engineers.

Design and lead the technical strategy for search across Vannevar’s products. Build and improve full-text, vector, and LLM-powered retrieval systems, optimizing latency, relevance, index quality, freshness, and performance. Collaborate with ML, product, design, and mission strategy teams to translate user needs into search innovations. Apply expertise in information retrieval, NLP, machine learning, indexing, ranking, query parsing, tokenization, vector search, and evaluation frameworks.

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll architect and build software solutions for national security, working closely with mission teams and stakeholders, ensuring reliable deployments and user engagement.

Owner of Vannevar's authentication and authorization platform: build tenant-isolated auth systems, self-service user/group/permission admin UI, tooling to visualize and validate access, feature-flag and platform management interfaces, and shared authorization capabilities across products.

Lead and grow a Security Platform engineering team to design and operate centralized identity and access services (IdP integrations, SSO, authorization frameworks). Define roadmap, partner cross-functionally, and drive adoption of secure-by-default access controls across products.