Vice President, Engineering

Flagship Pioneering•Cambridge, MA

About The Position

The Pioneering Intelligence team at Flagship Pioneering builds the digital and AI foundation that accelerates the creation and growth of our companies. We are seeking a Vice President of Engineering to lead a medium sized team of Principal Software Engineers, each operating as the technical authority for their own product area. This is a non-traditional engineering leadership role. Rather than managing a layered organization, you will build and support a team composed entirely of senior individual contributors operating as technical leads at the highest level. Each engineer owns end-to-end technical decisions, builds hands-on, and engages directly with scientific users. Your job is not to manage their work but to set the conditions in which exceptional engineers do their best work, remove obstacles, raise the collective bar, and translate technical strategy into organizational direction. You remain technically active. You will contribute to architectural decisions, review complex system designs, and stay close enough to the work to lead credibly. You spend roughly 25% of your time in hands-on technical work. The rest is spent on strategy, people, and organizational leadership: building the team, aligning with product leadership, representing the function to senior stakeholders, and driving the conditions for fast, high-quality delivery across the portfolio. The model is intentionally fluid. Principal Engineers on this team may move between pure IC work and the formal coordination of other resources as project needs evolve, including the management of fully embedded software engineering contractors. It is the VP who balances resources across all teams and projects, in close collaboration with product and strategy leads, ensuring the right people are working on the right things at the right time. You will work in close partnership with product and strategy leads and alongside a team of peers who expect the same rigor and accountability from you that you expect from them.

Requirements

Has led a team of senior individual contributors or principal-level engineers, ideally in a lean, high-velocity organization where the team was small and the scope was large
Has served as the technical authority on a complex, production-grade system, not as a manager who delegates the hard parts, but as an engineer who owned them
Has built and scaled engineering organizations in ambiguous, fast-moving environments, ideally at a startup or within a high-autonomy team inside a larger organization
Has worked closely with scientific or domain-expert users and understands how to build products that serve researchers, not just operators
Has hired and developed principal or staff-level engineers, with a track record of raising the technical bar of a team over time
Technically credible at the system design level: can evaluate architectural decisions, identify risk in complex designs, and contribute meaningfully to the hardest engineering conversations
Leads through clarity: sets direction, makes decisions, and communicates tradeoffs without requiring repeated alignment
Builds teams, not just products: knows how to hire exceptionally, develop senior talent, and create conditions where strong engineers stay and grow
Fluent in AI-native ways of working and comfortable leading a team that uses tools like Claude Code as a core part of their engineering practice
Writes with the same precision they expect from their engineers: strategy docs, architectural reviews, and hiring rubrics that don't require a follow-up meeting
Strategic and hands-on at the same time: comfortable moving between organizational leadership and technical depth without losing credibility in either
High standards without bureaucracy: holds the team to an exceptional bar without slowing them down with process for its own sake
Founder-minded: attracted to ambiguity, motivated by impact, and able to build clarity from uncertainty rather than waiting for it to arrive
Direct and decisive: makes calls with available information, owns the outcomes, and creates psychological safety for their team to do the same
Multiplier, not bottleneck: earns trust by making the people around them better, not by centralizing decisions

Responsibilities

Lead and develop a team of approximately five Principal Software Engineers, each owning technical authority for their own product area
Set technical strategy and architectural direction for the AI and digital platform, making or ratifying the most consequential build-vs-buy and system design decisions
Stay technically active: contribute to architectural reviews, design complex systems, and maintain the credibility to lead a team of principal-level engineers
Build and maintain the team itself: hire exceptional engineers, develop their careers, and create a culture where the floor is principal-level performance
Represent engineering to product leadership, senior stakeholders, and across the Flagship ecosystem, translating technical direction into business impact
Balance resources across all teams and projects in close collaboration with product and strategy leads, including decisions about when Principal Engineers take on formal coordination of embedded SWE contractors versus pure IC work
Drive delivery across the portfolio by removing blockers, resolving cross-team dependencies, and ensuring the team ships with speed and quality
Model and advance an AI-native engineering culture, including the use of tools like Claude Code as organizational force multipliers