VP of Engineering, Applications
Industry: Technology / Artificial Intelligence / Software
Overview of the Role
We are working with a growing technology company developing intelligent software products designed to simplify and automate everyday digital tasks.
The organisation is building AI-enabled products that can handle complex, multi-step workflows, interact with external systems and deliver reliable outcomes with minimal user input. As the product scales, they are looking for a senior engineering leader to take ownership of the application engineering organisation and translate advanced AI capabilities into robust, intuitive and production-ready products.
This is a senior, hands-on engineering leadership position with responsibility across backend, mobile and desktop development. The successful candidate will combine strong technical judgement with the ability to build and lead a high-performing engineering team.
What You'll Be Doing
- Own the application engineering strategy and execution across backend, mobile and desktop platforms.
- Lead and grow a small, highly capable applications engineering team covering backend, mobile and desktop development.
- Set the architectural direction for AI-enabled product workflows, APIs and client integrations.
- Ensure AI capabilities are integrated into products through well-defined abstractions, predictable behaviour and appropriate failure handling.
- Work closely with Machine Learning leadership to translate technical capabilities into scalable and commercially viable product features.
- Make high-impact technical decisions covering latency, cost, reliability, security and user experience.
- Establish clear ownership and architectural boundaries across backend, mobile and desktop engineering.
- Drive production readiness across application systems, including observability, monitoring, retries, fallbacks, privacy and cost management.
- Balance rapid product development with long-term engineering quality, scalability and maintainability.
- Provide technical leadership and raise engineering standards across the wider applications organisation.
Candidate Profile - Essential
- Significant experience leading application engineering or product engineering for complex software systems.
- Strong hands-on experience designing, building and deploying production-grade backend systems.
- Demonstrable experience delivering AI-enabled or machine-learning-driven products, with a strong understanding of the practical challenges of integrating AI models into production systems.
- Excellent system design and architecture skills across services, APIs, clients and data flows.
- Experience working across multiple application platforms, including backend, mobile and/or desktop.
- Proven ability to make significant technical decisions in ambiguous and rapidly changing environments.
- Strong track record of delivering products quickly, iterating based on real-world usage and continuously improving systems.
- Strong technical judgement, collaborative leadership style and a focus on raising engineering standards.
Required / Highly Preferred
- Experience leading senior engineering teams within a fast-moving technology environment.
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, APIs and modern application architecture.
- Experience working closely with Machine Learning or AI engineering teams.
- Experience balancing engineering priorities across performance, reliability, security, cost and user experience.
- Ability to remain technically engaged while operating at senior leadership level.
Beneficial
- Experience across backend, mobile and desktop application development.
- Experience building AI-first or AI-enabled consumer software products.
- Experience establishing engineering organisations, processes and architectural standards from an early or scaling stage.
- Experience with production observability, reliability engineering and operational tooling.
- Experience working within small, high-performing engineering teams.
What the Company Offers
The successful candidate will join a technically focused organisation where engineering leadership has significant influence over product direction and execution.
You will have the opportunity to: