Vice President of Engineering

Enboarder; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first culture

Comprehensive health benefits

Professional development opportunities

Job summary

Ocrolus is seeking a VP of Engineering to lead the integration of AI and fintech innovations. In this player-coach role, you will oversee engineering execution and drive the strategy for AI-native platforms. The ideal candidate has extensive software engineering experience and a strong leadership background, particularly in AI/ML systems.

Located in Washington, this position involves collaboration with a globally distributed engineering team and contributes significantly to reshaping how the lending industry operates.

Qualifications

• Experience shipping AI/ML systems to production.
• Strong background in architecture and system design.
• Hands-on leadership in a fintech environment.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end engineering execution: roadmap planning and sprint cadence.
• Lead the engineering strategy for integrating AI-native development practices.
• Represent engineering at the executive level.

Skills

Software engineering

Leadership

AI/ML systems

Distributed systems

Microservices architecture

Education

14+ years in software engineering

5+ years in engineering leadership

Tools

AWS

AI-native development tools

Job description

Come build at the intersection of AI and fintech. At Ocrolus, we’re on a mission to help lenders automate workflows with confidence—streamlining how financial institutions evaluate borrowers and enabling faster, more accurate lending decisions.

Our AI workflow and analytics platform for lenders is trusted at scale, processing nearly one million credit applications every month across small business, mortgage, and consumer lending. By integrating state‑of‑the‑art open- and closed‑source AI models with our human‑in‑the‑loop verification engine, Ocrolus captures data from financial documents with over 99% accuracy. Thanks to our advanced fraud detection and comprehensive cash flow and income analytics, our customers achieve greater efficiency in risk management, and provide expanded access to credit—ultimately creating a more inclusive financial system.

Trusted by more than 400 customers—including industry leaders like Better Mortgage, Brex, Enova, Nova Credit, PayPal, Plaid, SoFi, and Square—Ocrolus stands at the forefront of AI innovation in fintech. Join us, and help redefine how the world’s most innovative lenders do business.

We're at an inflection point. Large language models, agentic AI and our proprietary human‑in‑the‑loop verification engine are converging. The VP, Engineering will own how that transformation happens — in our product, our platform and how our teams build.

This is a player‑coach role: a hands‑on technical leader who progressed through the IC route — Architect or Principal Engineer — gets into the weeds when it matters, and leads at the executive level. You build the team and stay in the game.

WHAT YOU'LL OWN

Engineering delivery and velocity

• Own end-to-end engineering execution: roadmap planning, sprint cadence, release quality and cross-team dependency management
• Partner with the Product teams to align engineering capacity with product priorities; surface honest tradeoffs early
• Drive a culture of high velocity and high trust — ship fast, learn fast, fix fast

AI-native platform and product

• Lead the engineering strategy for integrating LLMs, agentic workflows and AI-native development practices into Ocrolus products at scale
• Drive adoption of modern developer productivity tools and AI-augmented engineering workflows across all teams
• Define standards for AI output quality, hallucination control, cost governance and production reliability
• Compress idea-to-ship cycles for GenAI features; set the bar for moving from prototype to production
• Partner with the ML and AI Transformation teams to embed AI into internal workflows, not just external products

Architecture, scalability and reliability

• Remain deeply hands‑on: lead architecture reviews, own critical system design decisions and drive technical decision‑making — not from a distance
• Own the technical roadmap across distributed systems, platform architecture, scalability and reliability for your engineering domain
• Set and enforce engineering standards: code quality, observability, incident response and security
• Make high‑stakes architectural calls that balance speed, cost and long‑term maintainability

Engineering organization

• Lead and grow a distributed engineering org across the US and India as one of three VP Engineering leaders; partner closely with peer VPs under the CTO
• Manage directors and senior managers; coach them into leaders who scale with the company
• Set the hiring bar, build the interview machine and recruit senior talent in a competitive AI‑era market
• Own DEI and retention outcomes within your domain

Executive and cross-functional leadership

• Represent engineering at the executive level; contribute to the narrative on technology execution, risks and investments
• Own your domain's engineering budget: headcount planning, tooling spend and cloud cost optimization
• Partner with Sales and Customer Success on enterprise commitments, SLA design and escalation resolution

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

Non‑negotiables

• 14+ years in software engineering with at least 5 years in engineering leadership; has scaled through Series C or equivalent growth
• Strong IC background — progressed through the Architect or Principal Engineer route with deep ownership of architecture, system design and technical decision‑making
• Hands‑on experience shipping AI/ML systems to production: LLMs, RAG, agentic workflows or document intelligence — not just oversight
• Proven ability to build and scale large‑scale distributed platforms with high availability and reliability requirements
• Has partnered with a CTO or CEO on technical strategy; comfortable in the executive seat
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, cloud‑native microservices architecture at scale (AWS preferred)

Strong signal

• Background in fintech, document AI, IDP (Intelligent Document Processing) or regulated data‑intensive industries
• Experience running engineering in a human‑in‑the‑loop or hybrid AI/human system
• Built or rebuilt engineering culture — hiring bar, onboarding, performance, career ladders — from a growth‑stage baseline
• Familiarity with modern developer productivity tooling and AI‑augmented SDLC practices
• Comfortable operating across US and India time zones with globally distributed teams

WHY OCROLUS NOW

• AI‑native at the core: integrating state‑of‑the‑art open- and closed-source models into a platform processing $100B+ in lending decisions annually
• Category leader: 400+ enterprise customers including PayPal, Brex, SoFi, Plaid, Better Mortgage, Enova and Square
• Real moat: proprietary HITL verification engine, 10+ years of labeled financial document data, 99%+ accuracy at scale
• Remote‑first culture built on Empathy, Curiosity, Humility and Ownership

Life at Ocrolus

We’re a team of builders, thinkers, and problem solvers who care deeply about our mission — and each other. As a fast-growing, remote‑first company, we offer an environment where you can grow your skills, take ownership of your work, and make a meaningful impact.

Our culture is grounded in four core values:

• Empathy – Understand and serve with compassion
• Curiosity – Explore new ideas and question the status quo
• Humility – Listen, be grounded, and remain open‑minded
• Ownership – Love what you do, work hard, and deliver excellence

We believe diverse perspectives drive better outcomes. That’s why we’re committed to fostering an inclusive workplace where everyone has a seat at the table, regardless of race, gender, gender identity, age, disability, national origin, or any other protected characteristic.

We look forward to building the future of lending together.