VP of Engineering

We're looking for a VP of Engineering to lead our team of talented AI engineers, full-stack engineers, and data scientists. You will lead our platform engineering team, dedicated to building a common substrate across our agentic AI workflows. In this critical role, you'll be managing high-quality delivery, technical excellence, and the growth and well-being of your engineers. You will be the force multiplier ensuring our project teams are productive, happy, and operating at peak efficiency while championing best practices in reusability and reliability across all customer solutions.

This is a high-ownership role based in New York City, with regular (4 days/week) in-office collaboration.

Our platform is purpose-built for highly regulated financial services, demanding a security-first approach and adherence to strict compliance, auditability, reliability, and accuracy requirements. The technical stack uses React for custom UIs, with a high-performance backend primarily in Python/FastAPI and Go and is currently built on Google Cloud.

What You’ll Do

• Drive Engineering Best Practices: Champion and enforce engineering excellence, coding standards, and disciplined development processes (e.g., code reviews, testing, documentation) in the platform team and set the standards for other pods.
• Focus on Reusability & Reliability: Strategically guide pods to build solutions with an eye toward reusable components, scalable architecture, and long-term reliability. Identify common engineering challenges and drive solutions that benefit all customer projects.
• Architecture & Design Oversight: Provide technical guidance and participate in high-level architectural and design discussions to ensure solutions are robust, maintainable, and align with company standards.
• Strategic Technology Leadership: Continuously track and set the technical direction for emerging LLM and Agentic AI systems to ensure the platform maintains a competitive edge and remains at the forefront of industry innovation.
• Ensure Timely & High-Quality Delivery: Monitor project health, manage risks, and proactively remove technical and process roadblocks to ensure the timely and successful delivery of customer projects.
• Resource Allocation: Strategically allocate engineers to pods based on project needs, skill sets, and career development goals, optimizing overall team utilization.
• Process Improvement: Continuously evaluate and improve the pods' development lifecycle, from requirements gathering to deployment, to increase efficiency and quality of output.
• Cultivate a High-Performing Culture: Foster an inclusive, collaborative, and psychologically safe environment where engineers are productive, motivated, and happy.
• Mentorship & Coaching: Provide ongoing coaching, mentorship, and career development support to engineers, helping them set and achieve ambitious goals and grow their technical and soft skills.
• Performance Management: Conduct regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and provide constructive feedback to support the growth and accountability of team members.
• Hiring & Onboarding: Actively participate in the recruitment and successful onboarding of new engineering talent to scale the team effectively.

• Customer-obsessed: You’re comfortable interfacing with clients, unblocking deployments, and delivering value.
• Structured thinker: You can distill ambiguity into clear problem statements and action plans.
• Builder mindset: You thrive in zero-to-one environments and are comfortable wearing multiple hats.

• 10+ years of experience in software development, with a strong background in building ML/AI platforms
• Experience building software that meets/exceeds high compliance, auditability, reliability standards
• Experience working in a customer-facing or consultancy environment where projects have hard deadlines and specific client requirements
• 5+ years of experience managing and leading engineering teams, preferably managing and prioritizing multiple simultaneous projects or teams
• Strong people manager / track record of managing engineers across levels over 3-5+ years
• Strong product delivery experience across many customers in enterprise over 4+ years at one place.
• Proven track record of driving engineering best practices, code quality, and implementing initiatives focused on system reliability and component reusability
• Demonstrated ability to balance the demands of multiple projects and effectively manage priorities and expectations with both technical teams and non-technical stakeholders
• Excellent communication, interpersonal, and conflict resolution skills
• Experience with agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban, etc.)

• Strong preference for manager of platform products (e.g, AI Platforms) vs. point solutions (e.g. Enterprise SaaS app)
• - Mix of big company and startup experience
• Experience in building AI products