VP of Engineering

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 CAREER RE:WORK · JOB SEEKER CONCIERGE Want a recruiter working for you, not for a job ad? Separate from the roles I'm hiring for. I find companies anywhere in the world that could use someone like you, hiring or not , and pitch you to the people who decide. 45 min career session CV + video in your own voice Your pitch to decision makers See how it works → I knock on doors that aren't open yet. 350+ hires · 11 countries · never ghosted a candidate whyhirewrong.com