🏆 Mission

The mission of the VP Engineering is to help our CTO build and lead an engineering team where exceptional software engineers are developed, recruited, and empowered to do the best work of their careers.

🤹🏽‍♀️ Profile & Experience

• Extremely strong generalist backend eng. experience (no specialization required in specific technologies, although useful if you have it),
• 5+ years of experience leading an engineering function as a CTO, VP, tech lead, etc., leaning in to either leading as a high performing IC or leading as a coach and manager,
• Still close enough to IC work (or sufficiently drawn to it) to have direct responsibility for writing and shipping big parts of our roadmap,
• Comfort working with business context (e.g. P&L) and translating commercial imperatives (e.g. “gross margin should be X%”) into both strategic and tactical work for product & engineering,
• Experience of the commercial dynamics of enterprise collaborations (e.g. solution engineering) and/or familiarity with approaches (individually or as a team) to customer relationship management as an engineer,
• Adept leading and participating in recruitment initiatives, including technical interviews and assessing for culture (exposure to a wide variety of assessment strategies, e.g. topgrading, is a bonus),
• Senior mindset: you might care about hoodies and unlimited PTO, but you’re likely to be more preoccupied with scoping work appropriately, developing your team, and helping people (and yourself) to work in your areas of maximum leverage.
  
  

🪢 Real Things You’ll Do

Here are some real examples of the sort of work you might expect to do in this role:

• Revamp Vocode’s RAG Pipeline
  
  

By Now, Incorporating a Knowledge Base As Context To An LLM Is Ubiquitous, But We Need To Run Document Retrieval Accurately And With As Little Impact To Conversation Latency As Possible. The VP Of Eng. Would Be Tasked With Owning This Project End-to-end, Including

• Self-hosting our own vector DB infra to not lose out on network latency,
• Computing state-of-the-art embeddings efficiently at scale (e.g. hosting an open-source model).

• Work alongside flagship enterprise customers to optimize performance at scale
  
  

Vocode’s enterprise customers are deploying conversational AI into the frontlines of customer support, operations, and sales. You’d have spent time testing and optimizing these deployments, both in direct consultation with technical and commercial stakeholders on the client side, and internally where we can improve Vocode’s infrastructure.

• Help figure out our approach to remote work
  
  

We generally believe that early stage startups naturally suit colocated teams because colocation reduces the overhead for information exchange, rapport-building, quick pairing and collaboration on work, etc. We’re also conscious that many people periodically prefer to work from home in bursts to prioritize productivity, and that a significant amount of talent is outside of our home base (the bay area). The VP Eng. would have been instrumental in shaping this conversation.