VP of Engineering
About the role SiteZeus is hiring a hands-on VP of Engineering to lead a small, senior product engineering team operating AI-first. You will own the technical direction, production quality, and delivery engine behind our location intelligence platform, while helping bring reliable AI capabilities directly into the product. This is a builder-leader role, not a manager-of-managers position. You will stay close to architecture, pull requests, debugging, and occasional hands-on implementation; coach strong engineers; and partner directly with the CEO to turn technical decisions into customer and business outcomes. We want someone with deep traditional software engineering judgment who has fully embraced AI-assisted development without compromising fundamentals. Full-time · Remote (U.S.), Tampa area preferred · Reports to the CEO What you will own - Architecture and platform direction. Define and evolve pragmatic standards for services, APIs, data flows, security boundaries, deployment topology, and interfaces. Make build-versus-buy decisions for the AI stack and steer modernization while preserving reliability and delivery pace. - Customer-facing AI systems. Architect and operate LLM-backed capabilities over proprietary location intelligence data: retrieval and embeddings, tool/function calling, structured outputs, agent orchestration, context management, authorization, guardrails, and evaluation. Own quality, latency, reliability, and unit economics in production. - Production engineering discipline. Raise the bar for security, secrets management, observability, CI/CD, automated and end-to-end testing, data integrity, incident response, and recovery readiness. Build safeguards that fit a small team rather than a heavyweight bureaucracy. - AI-native software delivery. Improve how engineers use coding agents, AI-assisted reviews, repository context, automated checks, and CI gates. Set clear boundaries for autonomous changes and human review, ensure testable outcomes, and track productivity gains alongside technical debt and tooling cost. - Planning and execution. Own the engineering operating cadence across Linear, GitHub, Slack, and Gong. Shape and sequence the backlog, connect customer conversations to priorities, define release readiness, and measure whether shipped work creates impact. - People leadership and executive partnership. Hire, level, mentor, and develop engineers; establish clear accountability and a thoughtful growth path. Partner closely with the CEO to explain tradeoffs, risks, investments, capacity, and the case for adding headcount. The team and how we work - You oversee the engineers building the SiteZeus product. - Your closest technical partner is the Director of Applied Science, who leads research and applied machine learning for our forecasting models but does not report to this role. - Together, you will bridge model research and production software so that advances become dependable customer-facing capabilities. - Our delivery system uses Linear for planning, GitHub for code review and CI/release, Slack for coordination and automated signals, and Gong for customer feedback. - AI coding agents are already part of everyday engineering. Your job is to make that leverage sustainable, measurable, and production-ready. What you bring - Engineering and leadership depth. 10+ years building and operating software, including 4+ years directly leading engineers. You have designed systems, shipped code, owned incidents, and remained technically engaged while leading a compact, high-performing team. - Proven production AI experience. You have shipped and supported LLM-powered features in real use. You can discuss