VP, Software Engineering

Guild · United States · 3 days ago

RemoteRemoteEngineering$300k–$356k/yrFull-time

About the role

To thrive as a company and meet our impact goals, we must cultivate a culture of high-performance. You can read about our culture principles here. We know managers are often the single-largest driver of employee satisfaction and growth, and our talent is our biggest asset. Because of that, we’ve identified consistent expectations for all of Guild’s people managers — helping you know what to expect from your experience here.

Responsibilities

Set technical and organizational direction across product, platform, and foundational engineering — turning Guild’s business strategy into a clear roadmap and putting your teams' effort where it matters most.
Own how the organization plans and ships — estimation, release readiness, and incident response — improving predictability and throughput with lightweight process, and clearing the blockers that slow teams down.
Balance shipping solid, reliable software with placing growth bets — deciding when to harden core systems and pay down tech debt, and when to fund the experiments that open new growth for members and employer partners.
Own the internal platform and foundational engineering — DevOps, shared services, CI/CD, and testing — so product teams can ship without wrestling the plumbing and the systems underneath stay reliable and secure.
Lead through ambiguity to outcomes — bring clarity to messy problems, decide with incomplete information, and keep teams focused on measurable impact as priorities shift.
Develop leaders and talent — coach and grow multiple Directors and Engineering Managers, set clear expectations, give frequent and actionable feedback, and create stretch opportunities so your people do the best work of their careers.
Build an inclusive, sustainable engineering culture — psychologically safe teams, a modern and AI-forward way of working, and a pace people can keep.
Partner across the company — work closely with Product, Design, and Data & AI engineering leaders, and represent engineering with executives and key vendors (e.g., AWS, Auth0) to align technical investment with company priorities.

Requirements

Proven ability to lead a multi-team engineering organization at the VP level — setting direction across several domains and owning outcomes across both product and platform engineering.
Demonstrated people-leadership as a manager of managers — you set clear standards, drive execution and remove blockers, grow talent through frequent, actionable feedback, and build psychologically safe, inclusive teams.
Comfort operating in ambiguity and driving to outcomes — you simplify complexity, make practical trade-offs with incomplete information, and orient teams around measurable impact rather than activity.
Deep technical credibility — you can weigh architectural decisions on their merits and earn the trust of senior engineers — plus the judgment to balance reliable, cost-aware systems with room for growth bets.
Strong cross-functional partnership — you build trust with Product, Design, and peer engineering leaders, and explain technical strategy and trade-offs clearly to both engineers and executives.

Preferred Competencies

Experience scaling consumer or B2B2C growth-product engineering and/or internal developer platforms in a high-growth environment.
Familiarity with a modern AWS serverless stack (e.g., Lambda, Aurora), GraphQL, and the tooling that supports an AI-native software development lifecycle.
Experience leading engineering through an AI-native transformation — building with AI as a first class citizen, agentic workflows, and platform guardrails responsibly.
Experience partnering with Data/AI engineering to ship AI-native product experiences.

Benefits

We are committed to equal pay for equal work and believe in compensation transparency. All salary ranges are standardized nationwide and will not vary by region. This role offers a competitive total compensation package, including a base salary of $300,000 - $355,950, variable compensation and stock options. Compensation offered will be based on a combination of factors such as experience, competencies, and internal equity.

Our benefits include:

Access to low-cost, high-quality health care options through Collective Health and Kaiser (due to coverage limitations, Kaiser is currently only available in CA & CO).
Access to a 401k to help save for the future.
Vacation policy to rest and recharge.
8 days of fully-paid sick leave, to take the time to heal and or recover.
Family-friendly benefits, including 12 weeks of parental leave for non-birthing parents and 18-20 weeks for birthing parents; 2-week ramp-up period for when employees return from a leave of 6 weeks or more; as well as employer-paid short-term and long-term disability, employer-sponsored life insurance, fertility and caregiving benefits.
Well-rounded wellness benefits including free and low cost mental health resources and financial wellbeing support services.
Education benefits and tuition assistance to help your future development and growth.