VP Engineering (opens in new tab)

The Leadership Agency Inc.; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 250,000 - 350,000; Full time

Job summary

The Leadership Agency Inc. in San Francisco is seeking a VP Engineering to lead the engineering organization across backend, mobile, and desktop platforms.

You will drive the transformation of ML capabilities into reliable, fast, and intuitive user experiences while owning high-impact technical decisions and architectural integrity. You will build and mentor a senior applications team, set architectural direction for AI-powered workflows and APIs, and ensure production readiness with

Qualifications

• Significant experience leading application or product engineering for complex systems.
• Strong hands-on background building and shipping backend systems in production.
• Experience delivering AI-powered products with model integration.

Responsibilities

• Own the application engineering strategy and execution across backend, mobile, and desktop.
• Lead and grow a senior applications team, including backend, mobile, and desktop engineers.
• Set architectural direction for AI-powered product workflows, APIs, and client integrations.
• Ensure AI capabilities are integrated with clear abstractions and graceful failure modes.
• Partner with ML leadership to translate model capability into shippable features.
• Make high-impact decisions on latency, cost, reliability, security, and UX.
• Establish clear ownership across platforms to prevent architectural drift.
• Ensure production readiness: observability, monitoring, retries, fallbacks, privacy, and cost controls.
• Balance speed and discipline—ship quickly while maintaining long-term quality.

Skills

Leadership

System design

Backend engineering

AI integration

Cross-functional

Education

Bachelor's in CS

Job description

# VP EngineeringSan Francisco, CA### Job TitleVP Engineering### LocationSan Francisco, CA### Job DescriptionOur product focuses on achieving high reliability for long-running workflows, persistent context, and real-world task completion. The system must handle multi-step reasoning, interact with external tools, and remain reliable despite non-deterministic model behavior.### **Role**Turn intelligence into a real product. You are responsible for the engineering systems, teams, and execution that turn ML capability into reliable, fast, and intuitive user experiences across backend, mobile, and desktop platforms.This role is a senior engineering leader who stays close to the product, makes hard technical decisions, and holds a high bar for quality and delivery.### **What You'll be Doing*** Own the application engineering strategy and execution across backend, mobile, and desktop.* Lead and grow a small, senior applications team, including backend, mobile, and desktop engineers.* Set the architectural direction for AI-powered product workflows, APIs, and client integrations.* Ensure AI capabilities are integrated into the product with clear abstractions, predictable behavior, and graceful failure modes.* Partner closely with Machine Learning leadership to translate model capability into shippable product features.* Make high-impact decisions across latency, cost, reliability, security, and user experience.* Establish clear ownership boundaries across backend, mobile, and desktop to prevent architectural drift.* Ensure production readiness: observability, monitoring, retries, fallbacks, privacy, and cost controls.* Balance speed and discipline – shipping quickly without compromising long-term system quality.### **What You Will Need*** Significant experience leading application or product engineering for complex systems.* Strong hands-on background building and shipping backend systems used in production.* Experience delivering AI-powered products, with a deep understanding of model integration trade-offs.* Excellent system design skills across services, APIs, clients, and data flows.* Comfort operating across platforms (backend, mobile, desktop), even if your depth is in one.* Proven ability to make high-impact technical decisions under ambiguity.* A strong bias toward shipping, iteration, and learning from real-world usage.* Low ego, strong judgment, and the ability to raise the technical bar for the entire applications organization.### **Outcomes*** Reliable, low-latency AI user experiences across backend, mobile, and desktop* Clear architectural boundaries that allow teams to move fast without constant rewrites.* Measurable improvements in system performance, stability, and production reliability.* Strong observability and operational discipline across all application systems.* A small, senior team that ships frequently, owns what they build, and raises the technical bar.* Team members are empowered, growing in their roles, and able to make high-impact contributions.### Posted onJune 29, 2026