Vice President of Engineering

Location: Remote; United States

Department: Engineering

Job Summary

The VP of Engineering is a strategic executive leader responsible for the long-term technical vision, organizational health, and scalable architecture of the Fluency platform. This role moves beyond day-to-day tactical ownership to focus on building high-leverage organizational structures, cross-functional alignment at the executive level, and a platform foundation that supports massive customer growth without proportional increases in technical debt. Crucially, this leader brings a proven track record of designing and executing large-scale system implementations within the high-volume advertising technology (Ad-Tech) or digital advertising ecosystem to fuel our next phase of scale.

Key Executive Responsibilities

• Executive Strategy & Influence: Partner with the CTO and C-Suite to define the long-term engineering roadmap and ensure continuous alignment with overarching company strategy and platform stability requirements.
• Organizational Architecture: Continuously refine and oversee the engineering organizational structure (e.g., Squad model) to ensure directors and leads are empowered to operate independently, preventing the VP from becoming a tactical constraint.
• Platform Resilience & Ad-Tech Scale: Maintain and evolve the strategic architectural direction of the Fluency platform—particularly blending our cellular/isolated database architecture with the high-concurrency, low-latency requirements characteristic of large-scale advertising systems. Ensure robust resilience under massive data volumes for hundreds of enterprise customers.
• Experimentation Framework: Define and enforce engineering standards and clear operational boundaries between experimental product R&D (Labs) and stable core engineering to safeguard platform integrity.
• Remote Leadership Excellence: Lead and foster a high-performance, geographically distributed remote engineering culture, ensuring seamless communication, accountability, and operational excellence across all time zones.
• Talent Strategy: Develop and manage the long-term talent strategy, overseeing hiring, professional development pipelines, and succession planning to ensure staffing aligns with future technical and business needs.

What We Look For

• Strategic Visionary: A leader who can articulate the business impact of technical debt and infrastructure investments to non-technical stakeholders.
• Systems Thinker: Proven ability to build "systems of people" that solve complex problems without needing direct executive intervention.
• Ad-Tech Scale Expertise: Deep operational understanding of high-throughput distributed systems, heavy data pipeline mechanics, and ecosystem integrations unique to the advertising world.
• Crisis Management Executive: Ability to remain calm and decisive during high-stakes incidents while simultaneously building the frameworks to prevent their recurrence.
• Executive Presence: Comfortable navigating organizational resistance and building compelling business cases for modernization.

Required Experience

• 10+ years of progressive experience in engineering leadership.
• 5+ years of engineering leadership experience specifically within the advertising industry (Ad-Tech, Mar-Tech, or high-volume digital media platforms), successfully delivering large-scale system implementations.
• Proven track record of scaling a SaaS platform through significant revenue and customer growth.
• Experience managing multiple managers or directors in a squad-based or departmental structure.
• Deep familiarity with AI-powered development tools and their impact on engineering productivity.