VP of Engineering

VP of Engineering
Founding technical team
Location: REMOTE in San Francisco Bay Area - with time on site at the practices each quarter
Reports to: CEO
Type: Full-time, founding team
You will join as VP of Engineering and carry the CTO title as you build out the team. Concretely, we expect you to hire five technical people in your first 6 to 9 months.
Where we are
We are building on top of a decades-old, successful architecture and engineering practice, with a long record of financial performance to fund the foundation of what comes next.
That is an unusual place to build from. We are not a thesis hunting for its first customer and product market fit. Whatever you build here has real practitioners and real projects to prove it against in week one. We see this as a model that will allow for the rapid iteration required to win at this massive market.
From that base we are building toward a billion-dollar portfolio, acquiring established practices and changing how their work gets done from the inside.
The team is five people. You would be the sixth, and the most senior technical person in the company. No legacy stack, no committee, no one above you to route decisions through.
We are in stealth for now. We will name the practice, and discuss what we are building, on our first call.
Why we are doing it this way
The technical work in this industry is expert, high-value, and still produced almost entirely by hand: inspection reports, drawing sets, code analysis, quantity takeoffs, and submittal review. Software vendors have spent twenty years trying to sell their way into that work and have barely moved it.
We think you have to own it instead. Buy the firms, inherit the project history and the practitioners, and rebuild the work from inside the practice.
The role
You will own the intelligence layer that runs every firm we acquire, and the products we build on top of it. The backbone comes first. It is not the only thing. The same system, pointed at the same proprietary data, supports a small number of products intended to define the way architects and engineers work — and standing them up is part of the mandate, not a someday ambition.
You are not building internal tooling and you are not running experiments. You are building products, defining the engineering discipline that produces them, and proving them in live practices with real clients and real liability. You are the first senior technical hire, and you will hire everyone who comes after you.
What you'll ownThe backbone. Architecture and build of the agentic system that runs the portfolio's technical work — model and tooling decisions, orchestration patterns, evaluation, and the infrastructure to run it reliably against sensitive client data.
A discipline that doesn't exist yet. Define what agent architect and agentic engineer mean here: the bar, the levels, the review standards, the shared patterns. Write the playbook, then hire and lead against it.
Deployment into real practice. Success is agents doing production work inside operating firms, not demos. That means real time with the engineers and architects whose workflows you are rebuilding, including time on site with the practices each quarter. This is not work you can design from a distance.
Scale across the portfolio. Build once, deploy into firms with different systems, conventions, and appetites for change — and make each acquisition faster to onboard than the last.
A small number of products, not a feature. The backbone is the platform. On top of it sits a small number of products, each built from the first commit to stand alone — clean IP boundaries, its own defensibility, real product thinking. Few of them, and each aimed at changing how the work is done rather than making it marginally faster. You own that roadmap, and we will walk through it under NDA.
What we're looking forYou have shipped agentic systems that real people depend on daily. Not prototypes, not pilots that quietly ended, and not model training or AI infrastructure alone.
At least a year, ideally two or more, building with agents in production.
Ten or more years in software engineering, at least three of them leading teams. We care less about the count than about what you did with it, but this is not a first leadership role. You lead engineering teams today and have hired into them.
You have done hard engineering at scale in the last five years, at an engineering organization of real size.
A computer science degree, either a bachelor's or a master's.
You are comfortable defining roles the market has not standardized, and hiring against a bar you set yourself.
You can sit with a structural engineer of thirty years, understand what they actually do, and earn their trust. This matters as much as the architecture.
You are unsentimental about models and frameworks. You pick what works now and expect to replace it.
Helpful, not required: architecture and engineering, another regulated industry, vertical AI, or post-acquisition integration.
Why this is worth leaving something good forEquity and participation in the products built on top of it.
A mandate to create products, not just infrastructure to support someone else's.
Proprietary data and captive users from day one. No cold start, no pilot purgatory.
A revenue-generating operating business underneath you, not a runway clock.
A direct line to the CEO and a mandate that spans the whole portfolio.

Experience
10+ yrs

Work arrangement
Yes