Vice President of Engineering, Applications

Location: United Kingdom | Hybrid / Flexible

Highly competitive package + equity

We are partnering with a well-funded, early-stage AI company with global ambitions to appoint a VP of Engineering, Applications.

This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who wants to help shape the core application architecture behind an ambitious AI-native product.

The company is building a proactive smart assistant designed for everyday use, combining sophisticated AI capabilities with reliable, scalable software engineering.

They are looking for someone who can lead experienced engineers, make important architectural decisions and remain genuinely close to the code.

The Opportunity

You will:

• Own application architecture across backend services, APIs and client integrations
• Lead a small, senior team across backend, mobile and desktop
• Design reliable integrations between AI systems and user-facing products
• Drive production reliability through observability, monitoring, retries, fallbacks and failure handling
• Partner closely with Machine Learning leadership to turn model capabilities into real product features
• Make pragmatic trade-offs across latency, cost, reliability, security and user experience
• Stay hands-on through design reviews, code reviews and key technical decisions

What We’re Looking For

We’re interested in people with:

• Strong hands-on backend and application engineering experience
• Experience designing and shipping complex production systems
• Deep understanding of APIs, services, integrations and data flows
• Experience integrating AI or ML capabilities into real products
• Strong instincts around reliability, observability and failure handling
• The ability to lead senior engineers without moving away from the technology
• Comfort working across backend, mobile and desktop, even if your deepest expertise sits in one area
• A strong builder mentality and bias towards shipping

Previous Technical Lead experience is useful, but title is not the deciding factor. Strong Staff or Principal Engineers, hands-on Engineering Leads and technically deep Engineering Managers could all be relevant.

Why This Is Different

You’ll be joining while many of the important architectural decisions are still being made.

There is real scope to influence what gets built, how it gets built and how the engineering team develops around it.

For the right person, this is an opportunity to help build the application layer behind an ambitious global AI product — and have a genuine stake in what it becomes.