VP of Engineering

About the role

SiteZeus is hiring a hands-on VP of Engineering to lead a small, senior product engineering team operating AI-first. You will own the technical direction, production quality, and delivery engine behind our location intelligence platform, while helping bring reliable AI capabilities directly into the product.

This is a builder-leader role, not a manager-of-managers position. You will stay close to architecture, pull requests, debugging, and occasional hands-on implementation; coach strong engineers; and partner directly with the CEO to turn technical decisions into customer and business outcomes. We want someone with deep traditional software engineering judgment who has fully embraced AI-assisted development without compromising fundamentals.

Full-time · Remote (U.S.), Tampa area preferred · Reports to the CEO

What you will own

• Architecture and platform direction. Define and evolve pragmatic standards for services, APIs, data flows, security boundaries, deployment topology, and interfaces. Make build-versus-buy decisions for the AI stack and steer modernization while preserving reliability and delivery pace.

• Customer-facing AI systems. Architect and operate LLM-backed capabilities over proprietary location intelligence data: retrieval and embeddings, tool/function calling, structured outputs, agent orchestration, context management, authorization, guardrails, and evaluation. Own quality, latency, reliability, and unit economics in production.

• Production engineering discipline. Raise the bar for security, secrets management, observability, CI/CD, automated and end-to-end testing, data integrity, incident response, and recovery readiness. Build safeguards that fit a small team rather than a heavyweight bureaucracy.

• AI-native software delivery. Improve how engineers use coding agents, AI-assisted reviews, repository context, automated checks, and CI gates. Set clear boundaries for autonomous changes and human review, ensure testable outcomes, and track productivity gains alongside technical debt and tooling cost.

• Planning and execution. Own the engineering operating cadence across Linear, GitHub, Slack, and Gong. Shape and sequence the backlog, connect customer conversations to priorities, define release readiness, and measure whether shipped work creates impact.

• People leadership and executive partnership. Hire, level, mentor, and develop engineers; establish clear accountability and a thoughtful growth path. Partner closely with the CEO to explain tradeoffs, risks, investments, capacity, and the case for adding headcount.

The team and how we work

You oversee the engineers building the SiteZeus product. Your closest technical partner is the Director of Applied Science, who leads research and applied machine learning for our forecasting models but does not report to this role. Together, you will bridge model research and production software so that advances become dependable customer-facing capabilities.

Our delivery system uses Linear for planning, GitHub for code review and CI/release, Slack for coordination and automated signals, and Gong for customer feedback. AI coding agents are already part of everyday engineering. Your job is to make that leverage sustainable, measurable, and production-ready.

What you bring

• Engineering and leadership depth. 10+ years building and operating software, including 4+ years directly leading engineers. You have designed systems, shipped code, owned incidents, and remained technically engaged while leading a compact, high-performing team.

• Proven production AI experience. You have shipped and supported LLM-powered features in real use. You can discuss retrieval/RAG, embeddings, tool use, evaluation harnesses, prompt/context design, failure modes, security, latency, and inference cost from firsthand experience.

• Genuine AI-native fluency. You actively use modern coding agents and can show how your workflow has changed. You understand their strengths, limitations, hallucination risks, review requirements, and the controls needed to run them responsibly across a team.

• Architectural and operational judgment. You are strong in data-heavy SaaS systems, APIs, pipelines, production testing, observability, CI/CD, and secure cloud infrastructure. You balance speed, maintainability, performance, and complexity with sound judgment.

• Practical stack fluency. Comfort reading and reviewing .NET/C# back-end services and TypeScript/Vue front-end work on Azure, with an ongoing PostgreSQL migration. You can collaborate across Python-based data/ML work when integrating research into production.

• Agents and spatial systems. Experience with orchestration patterns and frameworks such as LangGraph and MCP-based tools; familiarity with mapping and geospatial data, spatial queries, Mapbox or similar platforms, and performance considerations for large datasets.

• Modernization and communication. You have guided meaningful platform upgrades or migrations while continuing to serve customers. You communicate clearly with executive stakeholders and thrive with autonomy, ownership, and lightweight process.

Bonus points

• Domain experience. Location intelligence, retail site selection, trade areas, POI or mobility data, geospatial infrastructure such as PostGIS, or enterprise B2B SaaS.

• Small-team builder. Early-stage or founding-engineer experience; you have established the first dependable engineering practices rather than simply inherited them.

• Advanced AI delivery. Production agents working securely over customer-specific data, sophisticated evaluations, AI-enhanced CI/code review, or applied computer vision and decision-support pipelines.

Compensation and location

The base salary range for this role is $150,000–$170,000 per year; final compensation depends on experience. Remote within the United States; Tampa-area candidates preferred. Occasional in-person time in Tampa as needed.

Benefits

• Unlimited PTO that we encourage you to use *

• Flexible work hours

• 401(k); health, vision, and dental; and other traditional benefits for U.S.-based employees *

• Paid parental leave *

• Paid monthly community service time *

• Paid company summits

* For full-time employees

Core values

• Be Bold - Be fearless in reinventing our product, our company and yourself

• Extreme Ownership - Finds a way to solve problems and overcome adversity

• Act with Urgency - Act with a high sense of urgency

• Work with a Team Mentality - Puts the team's needs ahead of their own

• Be a Unicorn - Be exceptional in the pursuit of your craft

How to apply

Apply with your resume using the Apply button. The application includes one short written question: tell us about one AI-backed production system you helped build and operate, the engineering decisions you owned, what you learned, and how AI has changed the way you build today.

All U.S.-based applicants must be legally authorized to work within the United States. SiteZeus is not able to sponsor employment visas for this role. Degree requirements and preferences may be substituted for bona fide work history or relevant experience.

SiteZeus is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic.