Vice President, Engineering

About the role

The Vice President of Engineering at Pioneering Intelligence will lead a team of Principal Software Engineers, setting technical strategy and architectural direction for the AI and digital platform. This role requires a deep understanding of complex systems, clear communication, and the ability to build and lead a high-performing team.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a team of approximately five Principal Software Engineers, each owning technical authority for their own product area
• Set technical strategy and architectural direction for the AI and digital platform, making or ratifying the most consequential build-vs-buy and system design decisions
• Stay technically active: contribute to architectural reviews, design complex systems, and maintain the credibility to lead a team of principal-level engineers
• Build and maintain the team itself: hire exceptional engineers, develop their careers, and create a culture where the floor is principal-level performance
• Represent engineering to product leadership, senior stakeholders, and across the Flagship ecosystem, translating technical direction into business impact
• Balance resources across all teams and projects in close collaboration with product and strategy leads, including decisions about when Principal Engineers take on formal coordination of embedded SWE contractors versus pure IC work
• Drive delivery across the portfolio by removing blockers, resolving cross-team dependencies, and ensuring the team ships with speed and quality
• Model and advance an AI-native engineering culture, including the use of tools like Claude Code as organizational force multipliers

Qualifications

• Experiences: Led a team of senior individual contributors or principal-level engineers, ideally in a lean, high-velocity organization where the team was small and the scope was large
• Served as the technical authority on a complex, production-grade system, not as a manager who delegated the hard parts, but as an engineer who owned them
• Built and scaled engineering organizations in ambiguous, fast-moving environments, ideally at a startup or within a high-autonomy team inside a larger organization
• Worked closely with scientific or domain-expert users and understood how to build products that serve researchers, not just operators
• Hired and developed principal or staff-level engineers, with a track record of raising the technical bar of a team over time

Skills

• Technically credible at the system design level: can evaluate architectural decisions, identify risk in complex designs, and contribute meaningfully to the hardest engineering conversations
• Leads through clarity: sets direction, makes decisions, and communicates tradeoffs without requiring repeated alignment
• Builds teams, not just products: knows how to hire exceptionally, develop senior talent, and create conditions where strong engineers stay and grow
• Fluent in AI-native ways of working and comfortable leading a team that uses tools like Claude Code as a core part of their engineering practice
• Writes with the same precision they expect from their engineers: strategy docs, architectural reviews, and hiring rubrics that don't require a follow-up meeting

Benefits

Pioneering Intelligence offers competitive compensation and benefits, including equity, commensurate with experience. Other benefits include healthcare coverage, annual incentive program, retirement benefits, and a broad range of other perks.