VP of Engineering

UpperPlain; Time; On-site; NOK 900,000 - 1,200,000; Full time

Job summary

UpperPlain in Norway seeks a senior engineer to lead an AI‑first engineering practice and to architect reliable, scalable systems.

You will design, review, deploy, monitor, and hand work between discovery and delivery while coaching forward deployed engineers and collaborating with a COO and engineers on API contracts and data models. This role emphasizes quality and pragmatic architecture over long, unfocused engagements.

Qualifications

• Leads engineering while still building services, data, and cloud production work.
• Experience connecting or replacing real business systems, not just consumer apps.
• Runs incidents, backups, access control, and reliability tasks to keep clients live.
• Runs an AI-first engineering practice with assistants, evals, code reviews, and internal tools.
• Communicates with both COOs and engineers about APIs and data contracts.

Responsibilities

• Define how we design, review, deploy, monitor, and hand work between discovery and delivery.
• Choose stacks and patterns that fit the job: existing systems, security, scale, and the next twelve months, not a fashion list.
• Keep platforms hosted, backed up, observed, and patchable as part of the monthly partnership.
• Hire and coach forward deployed engineers, developers, and AI engineers who ship with judgment.
• Be the senior engineer in the room when an integration, data model, or AI step is about to become a long‑term mess.
• Protect quality without turning every client into a six‑month architecture project.
• You already run an AI‑first engineering practice: assistants, evals, code review, and internal tools that make the team faster.

Skills

Engineering leadership

Business systems integration

Reliability engineering

AI-first engineering

Cross-functional collaboration

Job description

• Define how we design, review, deploy, monitor, and hand work between discovery and delivery.
• Choose stacks and patterns that fit the job: existing systems, security, scale, and the next twelve months, not a fashion list.
• Keep platforms hosted, backed up, observed, and patchable as part of the monthly partnership.
• Hire and coach forward deployed engineers, developers, and AI engineers who ship with judgment.
• Be the senior engineer in the room when an integration, data model, or AI step is about to become a long‑term mess.
• Protect quality without turning every client into a six‑month architecture project.

What you will do

• Define how we design, review, deploy, monitor, and hand work between discovery and delivery.
• Choose stacks and patterns that fit the job: existing systems, security, scale, and the next twelve months, not a fashion list.
• Keep platforms hosted, backed up, observed, and patchable as part of the monthly partnership.
• Hire and coach forward deployed engineers, developers, and AI engineers who ship with judgment.
• Be the senior engineer in the room when an integration, data model, or AI step is about to become a long‑term mess.
• Protect quality without turning every client into a six‑month architecture project.

What you bring

• A track record leading engineering while still building: services, data, cloud, and the unglamorous production work.
• Experience connecting or replacing real business systems, not only consumer apps or greenfield startups.
• You have run incidents, backups, access control, and the boring reliability work that keeps a client live.
• You already run an AI‑first engineering practice: assistants, evals, code review, and internal tools that make the team faster.
• You can talk to a COO about a dispatch board and to an engineer about an API contract in the same afternoon.

AI‑first, in practice

• You expect every engineer to use models as part of daily work, and you know how to review that work so quality holds.
• You have put AI into production systems with logging, fallbacks, and a human in the loop where it matters.
• You will not hire for “AI strategy” that never touches a repository.