VP of Engineering (Hybrid, London)

About the role

This is a senior engineering leadership position in London, hybrid, for a frontier-AI product trusted by safety-critical engineers. You will shape the engineering foundation of the product while staying hands-on, with a clear path to CTO as the team grows. You will work directly with the founders and the model research team.

Key responsibilities

• Own the architecture across frontend, backend, data and infrastructure, including build-vs-buy decisions
• Deliver products quickly with early users, who are control and embedded engineers
• Build the model integration layer: inference serving, prompt and context management, tool use, streaming, evaluation hooks and fallbacks
• Set up trust workflows: traceability from requirements to code, diffing and review, test execution and audit trails
• Establish engineering foundations: CI/CD, observability, security, access control and cost control for GPU-backed workloads
• Prepare for enterprise readiness: SSO, data isolation and on-prem or private-cloud deployment for regulated industries
• Hire, mentor and lead the first engineers and define how they work

Required profile

• 10+ years building and shipping production software, with real depth in both frontend and backend
• Founding, lead or principal engineer on a product taken from early stage to paying customers
• Experience hiring and leading engineers, or a clear appetite to do so
• Clear written and spoken English, and comfort working with founders, researchers and customers

Required skills

• Strong TypeScript and React (or an equivalent modern frontend), plus at least one backend language: Python, Go or TypeScript/Node
• Cloud skills on AWS, GCP or Azure, plus containers and infrastructure as code
• Nice to have: compliance exposure (SOC 2, ISO 27001 or FedRAMP), serving custom or fine-tuned models (vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, Triton) and GPU infrastructure, Rust or C/C++

What we offer

• Salary of £150,000 - £200,000 per year
• Additional bonus of 0.5-1% equity
• CTO-level ownership of a product and a clear path to the CTO role
• Full-time, hybrid work from the London office with a full benefits package