Vice President of Engineering

We are hiring for our client- a well-funded AI startup creating innovative products at the intersection of web applications and modern AI. Their goal is to build seamless, delightful personalization experiences that enhance everyday life through trusted services.

About the company

• Backed by top Silicon Valley venture capital and leading angels from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, NVIDIA/ARM, and Oracle AI.
• Led by proven Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who have scaled startups to IPOs and Fortune 500 exits.

We’re looking for a

hands-on VP of Engineering

who thrives in ambiguity, moves quickly, and cares deeply about craft. This is a true zero-to-one leadership role: you’ll help shape the technical vision, architecture, and engineering culture while still writing code and shipping alongside the team.

What you’ll do

• Lead engineering strategy, architecture, and execution across the product and platform.
• Build and scale systems from prototype to production, with an eye toward performance, reliability, security, and scalability.
• Stay deeply hands-on: write code, review code, debug issues, design APIs, and help ship features.
• Partner closely with founders, product, and design to turn ambiguity into clear technical plans and shippable milestones.
• Set the bar for engineering excellence through lightweight processes, strong release discipline, and thoughtful technical decision-making.
• Help build the engineering team as the company grows.
• Engage with enterprise customers on architecture, security, and integration conversations when needed.

What we’re looking for

• 15\+ years of engineering experience, including senior or executive leadership in high-growth product companies.
• Experience building and scaling products from zero to one in early-stage startup environments.
• Strong full-stack technical background across frontend, backend, cloud, data, and ideally AI/ML systems.
• A highly hands-on operator who is comfortable staying close to the code and the team.
• Strong product sense and the judgment to make smart tradeoffs between speed, quality, and scale.
• Excellent communication skills and comfort aligning cross-functional teams around a technical vision.
• Early-stage startup experience required.

Nice to have

• Founding engineer, founding CTO, or first VP of Engineering experience.
• Experience shipping AI-powered consumer products, personalization, agents, or LLM-based experiences.
• Experience with modern AI infrastructure such as RAG, vector databases, orchestration, and evaluation tooling.
• Background in distributed systems, real-time infrastructure, or low-latency services.
• Experience with privacy-sensitive or regulated data.

Why join us

• Join a core founding team at a well-funded AI startup.
• Work with proven founders and top-tier investors.
• Have real ownership, high impact, and meaningful upside.
• Help define both the product and engineering culture from the ground up.

Location:

Bay Area candidates welcome to apply (

job location is on site in Palo Alto

)

Interested candidates can also write to [email protected] with their resumes and background. We will reach out to shortlisted candidates for a chat to discuss more about the role!