VP of AI Engineering & Platform

Vico; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 200,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

VICO is hiring a VP of Engineering to lead and grow the engineering team under the CTO. This hands-on leadership role involves managing junior engineers, shaping product and infrastructure direction, and accelerating development to deliver features for paying customers.

The ideal candidate thrives in ambiguity, moves quickly, and builds teams and technology from the ground up in a startup environment.

Qualifications

• Minimum 5-7 years of engineering management or tech lead experience.
• Hands-on with large language models in production.
• Experience with Python, React, PostgreSQL, and GCP.
• Startup experience in fast-paced, resource-constrained environments.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of engineers across the full development lifecycle.
• Partner with the CTO to translate architecture and strategy into roadmaps and priorities.
• Own engineering strategy and execution — delivery cadence, code quality, and platform architecture.
• Build and refine engineering processes that scale with the team without slowing it down.
• Drive hiring, onboarding, and retention as the team grows.
• Champion best practices around LLM integration, evaluation, and deployment.
• Contribute to technical decision-making around model selection, LLMOps, fine-tuning, and infrastructure for LLM-powered features.
• Interface with AI Research & Development to plan deployment of new models.

Skills

Engineering management

Startup experience

LLM experience

Python

React

PostgreSQL

GCP

Communication

Team building

Tools

LLMOps

GCP

Job description

VICO is hiring a VP of Engineering to lead and grow the engineering team under the CTO. This hands-on leadership role involves managing junior engineers, shaping product and infrastructure direction, and accelerating development to deliver features for paying customers.

The ideal candidate thrives in ambiguity, moves quickly, and builds teams and technology from the ground up in a startup environment.