Vice President, Engineering

Flagship Pioneering, Inc.•Cambridge, MA

12h•Hybrid

About The Position

Pioneering Intelligence builds the digital and AI foundation that accelerates the creation and growth of Flagship Pioneering's companies. This role is for a Vice President of Engineering to lead a medium-sized team of Principal Software Engineers, who act as the technical authority for their product areas. This is a non-traditional leadership role where the focus is on creating an environment for senior individual contributors to excel, rather than managing a layered organization. The VP will remain technically active, contributing to architectural decisions and complex system designs, while also focusing on strategy, people development, and organizational leadership. The role involves balancing resources across teams, collaborating with product and strategy leads, and ensuring fast, high-quality delivery. The VP will also model and advance an AI-native engineering culture.

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

Nice To Haves

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