VP, Agent Engineering
About The Position
Turn/River Capital is a private equity firm that applies a proprietary growth engineering strategy to investing, partnering with software businesses to accelerate growth and build enduring value. The firm’s team of equal parts investors and operators provides hands-on operational support and the flexible capital to systematically scale marketing, sales and customer success at its portfolio companies. Founded in 2012 and based in San Francisco, Turn/River has $5.6bn in committed capital and invests globally with a focus on North America and Europe. Turn/River is seeking a VP of Agent Engineering to unlock engineering capacity in our portfolio companies. You'll work directly with CTOs, CPOs, and engineering teams at our portfolio companies, building AI agents that automate recurring feature development. This is a hands-on building role where you will write agent code, design orchestration architectures, and partner with engineers daily.
Requirements
- 15+ years in software engineering, with production systems you personally designed, built, and shipped
- 3+ years building agentic AI systems in production - architecting orchestration, wiring tool use, debugging agent failures - not just directing others who do
- Fluency in LLM orchestration patterns with strong convictions about agent reliability that come from lived experience, not just white-papers
- Productive in a large, unfamiliar codebase within days/weeks
- Experience in B2B or enterprise software environments, including comfort with on-prem, legacy architectures, and compliance constraints
- Ability to walk a CTO through a technical strategy and back it up with a working demo
- Effective across organizational boundaries - equally comfortable pairing with engineers and presenting to executive teams
Nice To Haves
- Consulting, PE or VC portfolio operations, or multi-company technical leadership is a plus, but not required - we want hands-on operators
Responsibilities
- Identify recurring, high-yield feature patterns in portfolio company backlogs that consume disproportionate engineering time and effort
- Decompose those patterns into agent task hierarchies, orchestration flows, and validation loops
- Prototype agents end-to-end yourself, proving the approach and value on real backlog items before involving other engineers
- Use data and build working demos to earn CTO/CPO buy-in in order to dedicate the engineering team to agent development
- Technically lead the agent team: review architecture, pair on hard problems, set quality bars for agent output
- Instrument and track success: agent evaluation and accuracy, engineering capacity freed, roadmap velocity, defect rates
- Apply learnings across the portfolio, sharpening the approach and playbook(s) with each engagement
Benefits
- An opportunity to make an impact across multiple high-growth tech firms
- Competitive salary and discretionary bonus
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance covered 100% for employee & dependents
- Flexible vacation policy
- 401K matching
- Paid parental leave
- Commuter benefits
- Health and Wellness benefits
- Household Services benefits
- Home Office benefits
- Annual Home Office Equipment Reimbursement
- Donation matching
- Work from home Monday & Friday
- Energetic work environment with snacks and weekly team lunches
- 3x per week, centrally located near multiple public transit lines
- A company that enjoys having fun: holiday parties, annual company offsite and retreat, annual summer "work from anywhere" month
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Executive
Education Level
No Education Listed
