VP Engineering

Contact: Feel free to connect with https://www.linkedin.com/in/gchambers/

VP Engineering

📍 San Francisco, CA | On-site 5 days/week

💰 $400K–$500K base + competitive equity

Profitable, venture-backed AI company | ~140 employees

We are looking for a VP Engineering / VP of Engineering with deep Platform Engineering and AI Infrastructure experience to join a profitable, venture-backed AI company of approximately 140 employees in San Francisco. The ideal candidate has 10+ years of software/platform engineering experience , including leading engineering teams and scaling platform or infrastructure organizations through significant company growth.

We're looking for someone with recent Series A–D startup experience or rapid progression into VP/Head of Engineering-level leadership at a leading technology company. You should bring a deeply hands-on background across distributed systems, API design, cloud architecture, and production AI operations , strong TypeScript and/or Python experience, and daily use of frontier AI tools such as Claude and Cursor in your engineering workflow.

This is a true player-coach leadership role with significant ownership over the company's technical direction, engineering organization, and core AI platform.

🛠️ You will:

• Lead and grow a high-performing Platform Engineering team.
• Own technical strategy and architecture for the company's core AI platform.
• Lead development across AI infrastructure, AI agents, LLM orchestration, retrieval, evaluation, integrations, and developer tooling.
• Stay close to the code through PR reviews, architecture decisions, and hands-on technical problem-solving.
• Drive engineering velocity, reliability, scalability, observability, and quality.
• Partner directly with executive leadership on new products and platform initiatives.
• Build the engineering processes and culture required to support continued growth.

🧩 100% Required:

• 4–6+ years of engineering leadership experience , including formally managing engineering teams.
• Demonstrated experience scaling a platform or infrastructure organization as a company grows across revenue, funding, headcount, or product complexity.
• Production-scale experience with AI/agentic systems, LLM infrastructure, ML infrastructure, or other AI-native platforms.
• Ability to operate as a player-coach rather than a pure people manager.
• Strong architectural judgment and ability to evaluate complex technical tradeoffs.
• BS in Computer Science or a STEM-related field.
• Willing to work 5 days/week on-site in San Francisco.

🪶 Other Skills:

• Experience building new products, platforms, or technical initiatives from scratch.
• Strong understanding of LLM orchestration, retrieval systems, evals, and modern AI infrastructure.
• Strong product and business instincts alongside deep technical expertise.
• Comfortable operating closely with founders and executive leadership.
• Experience working in high-growth, technically demanding environments.

🧬 How The Company Works

• Profitable – established commercial traction with venture backing to support continued growth.
• AI-native – building sophisticated, production-scale AI products and infrastructure.
• High ownership – engineering leadership has significant influence over technical strategy and execution.
• Hands-on – leaders stay close to the technology, architecture, and technical decision-making.
• Fast-moving – new products and platform initiatives are developed and shipped quickly.
• High standards – the environment rewards technical depth, ownership, strong execution, and clear communication.