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VP of EngineeringWhyHireWrong? • London, England, United Kingdom
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VP of Engineering

VP of Engineering

WhyHireWrong? • London, England, United Kingdom
2 days ago
Job description

The Role

You will be the most senior engineer on the product and the person who decides how it's built. In year one you will write a large share of the code yourself. As the team grows, you will take over technical leadership of the platform: architecture, engineering standards and hiring. For the right person this is a clear path to CTO.

You will work directly with the founders and the model research team. You are the link between a frontier model and a product that safety-critical engineers rely on.

What You Will Own

  • Architecture: frontend, backend, data and infrastructure, including build-vs-buy decisions.

  • Product delivery: ship quickly with product and early users, who are control and embedded engineers.

  • Model integration layer: inference serving, prompt and context management, tool use, streaming, evaluation hooks and fallbacks. New model releases plug in without a rewrite.

  • Trust workflows: traceability from requirements to code, diffing and review, test execution and audit trails, so engineers can verify AI-generated code.

  • Engineering foundations: CI/CD, observability, security, access control and cost control for GPU-backed workloads.

  • Enterprise readiness: SSO, data isolation and on-prem or private-cloud deployment for regulated industries.

  • Team: hire, mentor and lead the first engineers, and define how they work.

Requirements

Must have

  • 10+ years building and shipping production software, with real depth in both frontend and backend.

  • Strong TypeScript and React (or an equivalent modern frontend), plus at least one backend language: Python, Go or TypeScript/Node.

  • Founding, lead or principal engineer on a product taken from early stage to paying customers.

  • LLM features shipped to production: model APIs or self-hosted inference, streaming, evaluation, and cost/latency trade-offs.

  • Cloud skills on AWS, GCP or Azure, plus containers and infrastructure as code.

  • Sound architectural judgement: you know when to move fast and when a shortcut costs too much.

  • Experience hiring and leading engineers, or a clear appetite to do so.

  • Clear written and spoken English, and comfort working with founders, researchers and customers.

Nice to have

  • Compliance exposure: SOC 2, ISO 27001 or FedRAMP.

  • Developer tools, IDEs, code editors (Monaco, VS Code extensions) or code analysis tooling.

  • Serving custom or fine-tuned models (vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, Triton) and GPU infrastructure.

  • Rust or C/C++.

  • Selling to and deploying in regulated or security-conscious enterprises.

Offer

  • CTO-level ownership of a product where frontier AI meets real-world engineering.

  • A clear path to the CTO role as the company grows.

  • Competitive salary and meaningful CTO-level equity.

  • Direct work with a founding team that combines AI research with hands-on experience building high-voltage and electric drive systems.

  • Hybrid working from the London office, with a full benefits package.

Hubert Warszta

Tech recruiter since 2012, founder of WhyHireWrong?

+48 787 216 527 | hubert@whyhirewrong.com | LinkedIn

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VP of Engineering • London, England, United Kingdom