VP, Engineering

Georgian; Dallas (TX); Hybrid; USD 250,000 - 350,000; Full time

Job summary

Total Expert in Dallas, TX is seeking a VP, Engineering to lead our Applications engineering organization, reporting to the SVP, Engineering and acting as the SVP’s partner and #2. You will shape the technical strategy and roadmap across six product areas, and own delivery and quality for them.

The role emphasizes building strong engineers, coaching leaders, and setting clear expectations to drive outcomes.

Job description

Total Expert is the Customer Operating System for financial services. Banks, credit unions, and mortgage lenders use our platform to turn data into relationships, and since 2016 it has enabled more than $7 trillion in funded loan volume. Our customers work in a regulated, high-stakes industry, run on legacy systems they can't replace, and need software that fits how their people actually work. Those are hard problems, and they reward engineers who get close to the customer and take ownership of outcomes.

We're also growing from a mortgage platform into one that serves banking, wealth, and insurance, and the products this role owns are where customers will feel that growth first. The work ahead is significant: a new orchestration engine that replaces seven legacy marketing automation systems, a migration of our Contact Service off the monolith, and lasting improvements to SMS reliability.

AI is changing what engineering work looks like. More of the mechanical work is being done by tools; more of the value is in judgment, review, customer understanding, and the ability to lead change. Most companies will add AI and get complexity. A few will turn it into a real operating advantage. We intend to be one of the few, and that comes down to people and culture more than technology.

We're building our Engineering and Product culture around three principles. You'll be the person who turns them into daily habits:

• Reality is the referee. Decisions settle on customer outcomes and evidence, not title, opinion, or "that's how my last company did it." If something is working, we double down. If it isn't, we stop.
• Disagreement is a duty. Raising a concern isn't a personality trait or a risk. It's part of the job, and we build mechanisms that make it safe and expected.
• Fix the system, not the person. When something breaks, including a hire, a team, or a project, we ask what allowed it to happen and fix that.

This is a hybrid role based in our Dallas, TX office. We ask that you live within commuting distance or be willing to relocate at your own expense.

The role

We're hiring a VP, Engineering to lead our Applications engineering organization, the customer-facing products our users work in every day. You'll report to our SVP, Engineering, and act as the SVP’s partner and #2.

You'll help shape our technical strategy and roadmap, alongside the SVP. You'll lead three engineering managers and roughly half of Engineering across six product areas, and you'll own delivery and quality for all of them. But your most important job is the people doing the work: developing leaders, setting clear expectations, holding people to them, and coaching them to get better.

This is not a role for someone who wants to run a bigger org chart. It's for a technically strong leader who builds teams that solve real customer problems, and who builds the system that keeps producing those teams after they've moved on.

What you'll own

Six product areas: Journeys and Campaigns, SMS and Communications, CRM and Lead Management, Content, Contact Service, and Mobile. Within them, four programs will define the year:

• The orchestration engine. The largest delivery commitment in Engineering: a multi-workstream program replacing seven legacy marketing automation systems with a single graph-based, event-driven engine.
• The Contact Service migration. A strangler fig migration that moves Contact Service off our monolith.
• Communications reliability. Structural improvements to SMS reliability, including CI gates, contract tests, and canary deploys, plus the team habits that make them stick.
• Multi-vertical readiness. Making sure campaigns, communications, CRM, and content work as first-class parts of our platform as we expand into banking, wealth, and insurance, not as bolt-ons.

You'll help shape the technical direction for these programs, with the SVP making the final call. You're accountable for landing them: the plan, the sequencing, the tradeoffs, the people, and the results.

What you'll be doing

• Develop leaders. Coach your managers and the technical leaders under them to know each person's superpowers and weak spots, manage to strengths, and use real stretch assignments to grow people faster. Build a bench so that key roles have successors. Expect this to be where most of your time goes.
• Hold teams accountable, with intent, not oversight. Set clear goals and make sure every team knows what it owns and what it committed to. Let teams decide how to get there, then hold them to it. Replace status meetings and approval chains with visible commitments, peer accountability, and direct customer feedback. When something slips, raise it early and directly. Fix the system first; when the issue is performance, coach it, and act when coaching isn't working.
• Shape the technical strategy, then deliver it. Bring a strong point of view to architecture, technical strategy, and roadmap decisions, with the SVP making the final call. Then translate those decisions into plans and team commitments across all six product areas. Balance the big architectural programs against the everyday delivery, reliability, and customer commitments that come with owning the products customers see. Stay close enough to the architecture, domain models, and key design decisions to spot drift early and raise concerns with evidence.
• Raise the talent bar, with our People team. Partner with People and Talent Acquisition on how we hire and onboard engineers. Define what great looks like for each role, make sure engineering interviewers are trained and calibrated, and own the hiring decisions for your org. Hire for learning speed, ownership, and low ego over pedigree.
• Grow and keep great engineers. Own how engineers and managers in your organization develop, advance, and stay. Build one team across our US and India locations on purpose, with the same standards, the same access to context, and the same paths to grow. Make Engineering a place strong people want to join and don't want to leave.
• Make reliability and learning structural. Run blameless reviews on incidents and on people issues like attrition, missed hires, and engagement drops. Land the guardrails that prevent repeat incidents, especially on the communication products where customers notice failures first. Make sure every fix lands in how we work, not in a document nobody reads.
• Lead change well. Bring people along on hard changes by understanding what they're protecting, treating constraints as design input, and closing every loop you open. Turn skeptical senior engineers into champions. Replacing seven legacy systems will test this.
• Get engineers closer to customers and Product. Organize around customer problems where it makes sense, and build tight loops between customer-facing engineers, Product, and the platform. Our application products are where Product has the strongest opinions and customers have the loudest voice. You'll be the engineering voice that keeps