VP of Engineering

Mekion Consulting; New York (NY); On-site; USD 200,000 - 350,000; Full time

Job summary

Mekion Consulting in New York, NY is seeking a VP of Engineering with 10+ years of experience to join a rapidly scaling technology company. You’ll spend ~75% of your time hands-on across product, design and engineering, and ~25% leading a small team of four engineers, reporting directly to the CEO.

You’ll lead product, design and engineering efforts, hire and grow the team, and drive AI-enabled product strategy to create exceptional consumer-grade experiences while shaping the engineering

Qualifications

• 10+ years of engineering leadership with hands-on IC component
• Proven record as a player-coach engineering leader
• Strong full-stack experience with React and Node.js
• Experience building AI-powered products
• Hands-on experience improving LLM systems (evaluations, experimentation, fine-tuning, agentic tooling)
• Experience building consumer or consumer-like products with strong UX and quality

Responsibilities

• Personally ship critical product across web, mobile, backend and AI systems, owning features end-to-end
• Lead, mentor and develop a team of four product engineers
• Hire and build the engineering team as the company scales
• Use AI, LLMs and agentic tooling to increase speed and quality
• Partner with CEO on product and technical strategy
• Help create beautiful, intuitive consumer-grade experiences
• Establish a high-performance engineering culture with ownership, quality and speed
• Build the technical foundations to support growth from $30M to $100M+

Skills

Hands-on leadership

Player-coach

Full-stack

React

Node.js

AI/LLMs

LLM tooling

User experience

Execution speed

Job description

We’re looking for an exceptional VP of Engineering with 10+ years of experience to join a rapidly scaling technology company that has grown from $4M to $30M in annual revenue in just one year, with ambitions to reach $100M+.

This is not a traditional VP Engineering role.

We’re looking for a genuine player-coach who still loves building.

You’ll spend approximately 75% of your time hands-on across product, design and engineering, and 25% leading an existing team of four product engineers.

Working directly with the CEO, you’ll have significant influence over both what gets built and how it gets built.

What you’ll be doing

• Personally ship critical product across web, mobile, backend and AI systems, owning features from initial user problem through to production
• Lead, mentor and develop a team of four product engineers
• Hire and build the engineering team as the company continues to scale
• Use AI, LLMs and agentic tooling throughout the development process to dramatically increase speed and quality
• Partner directly with the CEO on product and technical strategy
• Help create beautiful, intuitive, consumer-grade experiences
• Establish a high-performance engineering culture with a strong bias towards ownership, quality and speed
• Build the technical foundations required to support the next stage of growth from $30M to $100M+

What we’re looking for

This role requires someone who is equally comfortable writing code and leading people.

You’ll need:

• 10+ years of engineering experience, including engineering leadership with a significant hands-on IC component
• Proven experience in a player-coach engineering leadership role
• Strong full-stack engineering experience, particularly with React and Node.js
• Experience building AI-powered products
• Hands-on experience improving LLM systems through areas such as evaluations, experimentation, fine-tuning and agentic tooling
• Experience building consumer or consumer-like products where simplicity, UX and product quality really matter
• Exceptional product instincts — you naturally think about the user problem rather than simply implementing requirements
• An opinionated leadership style, high quality bar and strong bias towards action
• Comfort operating in a fast-paced environment where priorities evolve quickly and everyone remains close to execution

We’d love to speak with people who have previously been a:

• Founder or technical co-founder
• Early engineering leader at a high-growth startup
• VP/Head of Engineering who has remained heavily hands-on
• Senior engineer or engineering leader moving from big tech into a scaled startup environment

Experience within health, fitness, wellness, behaviour change, insurance, covered care or consumer fintech would also be valuable, but isn’t essential.

Tech

React | Node.js | AI/LLMs | Agentic Tooling

This probably isn’t the role for you if...

You’re looking to move away from coding into a primarily strategic or people-management position.

The person joining will be expected to personally build, experiment and ship alongside the engineering team.

This is an opportunity for someone who wants the scope and influence of a VP, while remaining deeply involved in creating the product.