DAY TO DAY:
Our client is a rapidly growing, multi-location services organization seeking a Vice President of Engineering to lead the evolution of its technology platform and engineering organization.
The company is undergoing significant growth and transformation and is investing heavily in technology to support its expanding operations. The technology organization is being built and matured as the company scales, creating an opportunity for a hands-on, strategic engineering leader to establish the technical foundation, operating model, and engineering discipline for the future.
This role will own how the company’s software is built, delivered, and maintained. As the senior engineering leader, you will provide technical leadership across architecture, software delivery, quality, security, reliability, and engineering partnerships.
The organization is actively modernizing a mission-critical platform while continuing to support day-to-day business operations. Multiple modernization initiatives are underway simultaneously, including application modernization, architectural evolution, user experience improvements, and enhancements to the company’s data ecosystem. This leader must be able to balance long-term technical transformation with the immediate need to continue delivering value to the business.
A significant portion of the current engineering capacity is supported through external partners. This role will play a critical role in evolving the vendor strategy, strengthening internal engineering capabilities, and creating a sustainable delivery model that combines internal talent, strategic partners, and emerging AI-enabled development practices.
The VP of Engineering will lead an existing engineering leader and help build out the broader organization over time. The environment requires someone comfortable stepping into a growing technology organization, creating structure where processes may still be evolving, and raising the overall level of engineering rigor and technical leadership.
WHAT YOU WILL OWN
Architecture & Technical Strategy
Define and drive the technical direction of the platform, including application architecture, service and integration strategy, APIs, data access patterns, and modernization priorities. Balance technical debt reduction and modernization efforts against ongoing business and product commitments.
Software Delivery & Release Governance
Own the end-to-end software development lifecycle and establish strong engineering operating practices around planning, estimation, environments, change management, release readiness, and production deployment. Improve delivery predictability without creating unnecessary process overhead.
Quality Engineering
Build and mature a quality engineering strategy that emphasizes automation, continuous integration and deployment, testing, code quality, security scanning, and proactive defect prevention. Shift quality earlier in the development lifecycle and reduce reliance on manual testing.
Engineering Partner & Vendor Strategy
Lead relationships with external engineering partners and establish clear accountability for delivery, quality, technical ownership, and knowledge transfer. Ensure the organization maintains appropriate ownership and control over its technology, intellectual property, and engineering assets.
Internal Engineering Capability
Build and strengthen internal engineering leadership and technical expertise over time. Develop a scalable team structure across engineering management, senior technical leadership, quality, and platform capabilities while reducing dependency on individual contributors or outside partners.
AI-Enabled Engineering
Develop a practical strategy for incorporating AI and agentic development capabilities into the software development lifecycle. Establish appropriate standards, governance, quality controls, and measurement to ensure these tools improve engineering productivity without compromising reliability or security.
Reliability & Observability
Own the engineering approach to monitoring, alerting, incident response, and production reliability. Improve visibility into application performance and establish clear expectations around recovery, operational readiness, and continuous improvement.
Security Engineering
Partner with infrastructure and security stakeholders to strengthen the security posture of the application environment. Address inherited technical risks, improve application security practices, and ensure engineering is prepared to support evolving compliance and audit requirements.
Engineering Efficiency & Economics
Develop visibility into engineering productivity, delivery efficiency, and technology costs. Help leadership understand the investment required to operate, maintain, and evolve the platform and make deliberate decisions about resource allocation.
Partnership with Product & Business Leadership