VP of AI Engineering

CampusEvolve; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

CampusEvolve is seeking a senior VP of AI Engineering to lead the Pathways AI-native guide. This role is 80% hands-on and will make engineering decisions, delivering the product with a small, dedicated team. You will work closely with the Founder/CEO and CTO to create impactful, scalable solutions.

You will architect systems, ensure privacy and security, coach engineers, and partner with product and stakeholders to drive adoption and outcomes in education and workforce pathways.

Qualifications

• Senior leadership experience leading engineering teams
• Demonstrated ability to ship AI-native features
• Strong hands-on coding and system design skills

Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor a 3-person engineering team
• Own architectural decisions and product delivery for Pathways
• Collaborate with Founder/CEO, CTO and product manager
• Ensure privacy, security, and compliance across the product
• Engage with funders and state agency partners on technical questions

Skills

Technical leadership

Hands-on software engineering

AI product development

Architecture & system design

Security & privacy

Stakeholder communication

Job description

Our VP of AI Engineering builds Pathways, an AI-native guide that helps people take real next steps toward education, careers, and economic security, and builds the team's ability to ship it with AI.

CampusEvolve (campusevolve.ai) is a Seattle-based, mission-driven AI startup backed by the Gates Foundation, Schultz Family Foundation, and GitLab Foundation. Pathways is one tool for a person's whole pathway: from high school into a two-year or four-year program, a certificate, an apprenticeship, or the military, and on into work. People most often fall off a pathway in the gaps between programs, so Pathways is built to carry them across those gaps. Its retrieval layer covers more than 6,000 post-secondary credential programs in Washington State, plus financial aid, career guidance, and basic-needs resources like housing, food, and transportation. The north star is economic mobility, and at CampusEvolve, the mission is the culture.

This is a senior leadership role that's about 80% hands-on building. You deliver the product rather than make sure it gets delivered, and you make engineering decisions, not recommendations. You'll lead three full-time engineers, work closely with the Founder/CEO and CTO, and partner with a full-time product manager and the VP of Community, who runs a network of 100+ co-design partners across K-12, post-secondary, and workforce programs. State agency partners are ready to roll out Pathways once it's engaging and safe, and you'll lead the engineering that gets it there.

Alongside the building, you keep engineering, product, partners, and leadership moving together, and you work directly with end users far more than most engineering leaders do.

What You'll Work On

• Ship simple, mobile-first AI experiences that turn real learner and job seeker problems into completed next steps, with deep context awareness, more agency for users, and handoffs to human advisors when they need one
• Build AI-native and multiply the team's output. Use coding agents yourself to ship working software fast, coach engineers in using them well, and help define the team's agentic development lifecycle: clear objectives and acceptance criteria, adversarial multi-model passes on the spec, and a strong evaluation harness
• Connect product analytics, AI evaluation, synthetic-user tests, user research, and real task outcomes to fast release decisions, and show improvements with evidence
• Create reusable conversation, planning, resource-grounding, state, and action patterns that can be configured quickly for new personas, scenarios, localities, and partners
• Take features through controlled production, owning architecture, data and state integrity, test automation, observability, performance, cloud cost, and release quality
• Architect identity and access for learners, advisors, and partner institutions, including privacy-preserving sign-in, consent, delegated access, and role-based authorization. Outside security and privacy specialists support hardening, reviews, and compliance, and you own integrating their work into the product
• Be the technical voice with funders and state agency partners, including answering their hardest questions about safety and outcomes

What Success Looks Like

• Within the first months, Pathways reaches high school students after a few rapid cycles of engineering and hardening
• Within six months, it serves thousands of high school users
• Within twelve months, it's adapted for many personas, each tied to a real outcome such as enrolling in a post-secondary program, starting an apprenticeship, or getting a job, on the way to about 100,000 users in Washington State
• The team ships faster and with higher quality because of how you build and how you coach

Location

This role is fully remote within the U.S., and CampusEvolve doesn't have an office. Candidates must be authorized to work in the U.S. CampusEvolve is unable to sponsor visas or accept H-1B transfers.