The RoleWe're not hiring a VP of Engineering to sit in meetings. We're hiring our
mad scientist - the person who prototypes the thing everyone said was a quarter away, ships it in a week, and then builds the systems that make it production-grade.
This is a true
player-coach role: you'll spend the majority of your time (~70%) building - architecting systems, writing code, designing AI pipelines - and the rest leading. You'll own our engineering organization end to end: our offshore engineering team today, and the in-house team you'll help us recruit and build around you.
Moby moves fast. Founders here prototype working products in days and put them in front of partners the same week. Your job isn't to slow that down - it's to make speed sustainable: adding the testing, CI/CD, AI evaluation, and QA discipline that lets us ship fearlessly at scale.
What You'll Do- Build. Stay hands-on in the codebase most of your week - from our consumer platform to our Partner API to our AI research and content pipelines.
- Drive AI innovation. Own the architecture behind our LLM-powered research engine: retrieval, evaluation, cost accounting, and caching. Push what's possible before competitors know it's possible.
- Lead the team. Manage and prioritize our offshore engineering team day to day, and design + recruit the in-house engineering team we build next.
- Set the bar. Establish engineering standards - code review, testing, CI/CD, release process, AI evals - that raise quality without killing velocity.
- Shape the culture. Make Moby engineering a place where great builders want to work: high autonomy, high trust, high output.
- Partner with founders. Work directly with the co-founders on product strategy, technical due diligence for partnerships, and build-vs-buy decisions.
Who You Are- A senior engineer/leader who has shipped at scale - ideally with time at a top-tier tech company (Apple, Meta, Google, Amazon) or a major fintech - and now wants ownership, speed, and impact over bureaucracy.
- Deeply fluent in modern AI development: LLM applications, RAG, evals, and the economics of running AI in production.
- A builder first. You'd rather prototype the answer than write a memo about it - but you know when a prototype needs to become a system.
- An experienced people leader who can run distributed teams and knows how to hire exceptional engineers.
- Comfortable across the stack (we work in Go, Node.js, NextJS, Flutter, GCP/Postgres - you don't need all of them, but you need range).
- Excited by markets and investing. You don't need a finance background, but you should find the problem space fascinating.
Why This Role- Real ownership. You'll be the most senior technical person at the company, reporting directly to a co-founder.
- A playground, not a maintenance job. New products get greenlit and shipped in weeks, not quarters - AI chat, partner APIs, research tooling, trading integrations.
- Leverage. A small team reaching tens of millions of people, with AI doing the heavy lifting.
- Equity that matters. Meaningful ownership in a fast-growing, revenue-generating company.
Logistics- NYC metro strongly preferred (hybrid); open to full remote within US time zones for an exceptional candidate.
- Compensation: $200,000 base salary + meaningful equity
