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 ofWhyHireWrong?

+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 candidatewhyhirewrong.com