VP of Engineering

San Francisco • On-site five days a week • Full-time • Engineering

$400,000-$500,000 annual base salary plus equity
The role

As VP of Engineering, you'll lead the engineering organization and build alongside it. We expect you to spend part of each day doing hands-on technical work. You'll take ownership of parts of the system, design and implement changes, write and review code, and help ship and operate what you build. You'll bring the technical judgment and implementation skills of a Staff Engineer to decisions that affect the whole organization.

You'll directly lead Product Engineering and manage our existing Platform Engineering leader, who runs the platform teams day to day. You'll also lead interface.ai Labs and oversee Security and Privacy. Customer Deployment Engineering reports into Engineering, with a dotted line to the leader responsible for customer delivery.

You'll report to CEO Srinivas Njay and partner closely with CTO and co-founder Bruce Kim on architecture and technical strategy. You'll work with Product, Design, and customer-facing teams to turn customer needs into engineering priorities, make commitments the teams can deliver, and surface risks early.
What you'll own

• Product Engineering. Lead the teams building member-facing voice and chat agents, banking self-service and transaction workflows, and Nexus, our AI-powered contact center experience. Improve products customers rely on today and take new agentic products from discovery into production.
• Architecture and hands-on development. Work with Bruce and engineering leads on consequential design decisions. Take on well-defined parts of the system yourself, from prototyping and implementation through testing, release, and production follow-up.
• Platform Engineering. Work with the Platform Engineering leader to set priorities for the shared agent runtime, knowledge and retrieval, evaluations, banking integrations, data infrastructure, and Assemble, our agent-building platform. Make it easier for product teams to reuse these capabilities and ship independently.
• interface.ai Labs. Lead our applied research team as it builds the core technology for our next bets in autonomous banking. Set the research agenda, work alongside the team on early prototypes, and define how we evaluate which ideas are ready to advance. Partner with Product and Platform Engineering to turn promising results into capabilities we can ship and operate.
• Customer Deployment Engineering. Own the engineering work that takes products live at financial institutions. Work with customer delivery leadership to plan launches, resolve integration and configuration issues, and make deployments more repeatable.
• Security, privacy, and reliability. Lead Security and Privacy within Engineering. Set standards for testing, AI evaluations, release readiness, observability, and incident response.
• People and engineering culture. Hire and coach engineering leaders, develop senior technical talent, and set clear expectations for performance and ownership. Use coding agents across development, testing, and review, and measure their effect on delivery speed, rework, and production quality.

What we're looking for

• You build at the level of a Staff Engineer. You can take an ambiguous technical problem, design a solution across system boundaries, implement a meaningful part of it yourself, and own the result in production. You can walk us through substantial code you've written and shipped recently and explain the architectural decisions you made.
• You've built and shipped agentic or AI-native products. AI was central to how the product worked and why customers used it. You made consequential engineering decisions and can explain how you evaluated the system and made it reliable in production.
• You've led applied research before. You've led a team that developed new technology for future products. You can walk us through a bet you owned, what your team built, how you evaluated it, and how the work moved into a pilot, product, or platform. That experience could come from a research lab, a startup, or an engineering team with an applied research mandate.
• You think and act like an entrepreneur. You've taken a product from an uncertain idea to real customer use. You work directly with customers, test assumptions quickly, and decide where to invest, what to simplify, and when to change course.
• You've led and scaled multiple engineering teams. You've hired and developed managers and technical leads who can own outcomes independently. You know how to delegate, manage dependencies, and follow through on customer commitments.
• You use AI development tools yourself. You can show where they improved how you and your team build and ship, and how you verified the results.

We'd be especially interested in hearing from former engineering managers or directors who deliberately returned to hands-on engineering, recently operated at Staff Engineer level, and want to build and lead teams in the same role. Experience in fintech, regulated enterprise software, conversational AI, or contact-center products is a plus.
Benefits

Company-paid employee medical, dental, and vision coverage, a 401(k), paid parental leave, discretionary PTO, commuter and wellness benefits, office meals, and access to advanced AI tools.