VP AI - THUNDERS.AI

Station F; Paris; Remote; EUR 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Possible remote work

Job summary

Thunders is seeking a hands-on senior AI engineering leader to own the architecture and build a scaling AI-powered product. You will lead a small team, drive the engineering culture, and translate strategy into robust, scalable systems.

You will oversee AI trends, tooling, sprint execution, and data-driven metrics to ensure high-quality, repeatable delivery while shaping the people and processes behind the technology.

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading AI engineering teams in agile product cycles.
• Deep knowledge of agent architecture and autonomous systems.
• Experience building secure, robust AI systems with measurable value.

Responsibilities

• Define scalable AI architecture aligned to product roadmap.
• Lead a small AI engineering team with performance reviews.
• Make critical technical decisions and guide experimentation.

Skills

AI architecture

Team leadership

Technical decision-making

Sprint execution

Data-driven culture

OKRs

cross-team collaboration

English communication

Tools

LLMOps stack

Agent-centric architectures

Job description

About

Thunders is an agentic solution for automated testing in natural language.

Founded in January 2025, we've already raised $9M to accelerate our mission : making software testing faster, smarter, and effortless.

Our fast-growing team of 30+ people brings together experts in AI, product, and quality engineering to reinvent how testing is done.

Today, testing is still one of the biggest bottlenecks in software delivery. With the rise of AI-generated code, test volumes are exploding yet testing remains slow, fragile, and often disconnected from what really matters to the business.

Thunders changes the game.

Our solution automatically generates and runs test plans in natural language, powered by specialized agents (accessibility, UX, performance, SEO).

The result: autonomous, intelligent tests that adapt to your product and keep up with your pace.

Learn more at www.thunders.ai

Job Description

Lead the engineering behind Thunders.ai's intelligent systems. You'll own the architecture, build and grow the team, and set the execution culture for AI-powered products that solve real problems at scale. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who wants to shape both the technology and the people building it.

• AI Architecture & Technical Strategy: Define and drive the scalable architecture for Thunders.ai, translating the product roadmap into robust, well-engineered systems.
• Team Leadership: Hire, lead, and manage a small, high-performing AI engineering team, owning individual performance management through regular feedback and reviews.
• Technical Decision-Making: Own critical technical decisions while empowering team members to propose, test, validate, and measure ideas.
• AI Trends & Tooling: Monitor emerging AI trends, technology news, and best practices to guide architectural decisions and tooling choices.
• Sprint Execution: Run and lead key sprint execution milestones, including triage, spec reviews, retrospectives, and stand-ups, while verifying milestone completion and operational excellence.
• Data-Driven Culture: Deploy a data-driven culture focused on OKRs, linking team and individual targets to measurable technical impact and transparent reporting.
• Team Culture: Promote a collaborative, ethical, and psychologically safe team culture that encourages innovation, knowledge sharing, feedback, and continuous improvement.
• Scalability & Reliability: Ensure, measure, and monitor system scalability, health, and reliability.
• LLMOps Ownership: Define, optimize, and operate the LLMOps stack.
• Leadership Principles: Align with and promote the company's leadership principles: Bias for Action, Frugality, Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit.

Preferred Experience

• You are a System Thinker: You naturally model complex systems end-to-end (product, data, models, infrastructure, security, and people). You can decompose ambiguous problems into clear components, define interfaces and ownership, and anticipate second-order effects (cost, latency, reliability, privacy, and maintainability).
  • Strong ability to reason about trade-offs (build vs buy, accuracy vs latency, batch vs streaming, centralization vs autonomy) and make decisions explicit.
  • Comfortable designing for scale and robustness: observability-first, failure modes, graceful degradation, and clear SLOs/SLIs.
  • Systems mindset across the org: align architecture with product strategy, sprint execution, OKRs, and team design; unblock cross-team dependencies with crisp docs and diagrams.
• Proven experience building and leading AI engineering teams in agile environments driven by rapid product iteration and research-to-production cycles - ideally customer facing.
• Deep technical knowledge of agent architecture, autonomous system design, and modern AI platforms.
• Strong awareness of leading-edge tools and best practices for agent-centric architectures.
• Ability to implement solutions directly while enabling the team to deliver faster and with higher quality.
• Strong organizational and communication skills for effective cross-team collaboration.
• Experience building secure, robust, user-centered AI systems that continuously deliver measurable value.
• Ability to define and operate engineering processes, sprint rituals, OKRs, and performance feedback loops.
• Excellent English communication skills; French is a plus.
• Ability to work efficiently in a hybrid environment and travel to meet partners and team members when needed.
• Big AI User, every day, for everything, Claude and similar tools have no secret for you.

Additional Information

• Contract Type: Full-Time
• Location: Paris
• Possible full remote