VP, Engineering

Total Expert•Dallas, TX

About The Position

Total Expert is hiring a VP, Engineering to lead its Applications engineering organization, which owns six customer-facing product areas: Journeys and Campaigns, SMS and Communications, CRM and Lead Management, Content, Contact Service, and Mobile. The VP reports to the SVP, Engineering and serves as the SVP’s partner and #2, helping shape technical strategy and the roadmap while owning execution, delivery, and quality across the organization. The role leads three engineering managers and roughly half of Engineering. The VP will guide four major programs: replacing seven legacy marketing automation systems with a graph-based, event-driven orchestration engine; migrating Contact Service off the monolith; improving SMS reliability through structural safeguards and team practices; and preparing product capabilities to serve banking, wealth, and insurance as first-class platform verticals. The SVP makes final technical-direction decisions, while the VP is accountable for plans, sequencing, tradeoffs, people, and outcomes. A central focus is developing managers and technical leaders, setting clear expectations, building succession depth, and helping engineers grow and stay. The role also partners with People and Talent Acquisition to improve hiring and onboarding, builds a cohesive engineering organization across U.S. and India locations, and establishes practices for accountability, blameless learning, reliability, and constructive dissent. The VP stays close to architecture, design decisions, incidents, customers, and Product, and leads AI adoption across the organization while maintaining quality through review, testing, and approval standards. The anticipated base salary is $240,000–$280,000 annually. The role is eligible for an annual discretionary bonus and participation in the Employee Stock Option Plan. Applicants must be authorized to work for any U.S. employer; visa sponsorship is not available.

Requirements

Typically 15+ years building and operating enterprise SaaS.
At least 5 years leading engineering organizations through managers.
Track record of building strong engineering teams, including distributed and global teams.
Experience setting a high hiring bar in partnership with recruiting and developing engineers and managers into larger roles.
Demonstrated ability to hold teams accountable for commitments while maintaining trust, including turning around teams after missed deliveries or production incidents.
Strong technical background and hands-on experience with customer-facing applications, event-driven and distributed systems at scale, and legacy modernization.
Experience leading large, multi-team programs from design through production delivery.
Examples of leading change through resistance, including gaining the support of respected senior people who initially opposed the change.
History of partnering with a strong technical leader, helping shape strategy, executing it, and making that leader more effective.
Personal use of AI tools in engineering work and a point of view on AI’s effects on engineering teams, roles, and quality practices.
Customer-focused approach, including understanding how customers use products and measuring success by customer value.
Ability to remain technically credible in design and incident reviews as well as roadmap discussions with Product.
Ability to set clear expectations, give timely feedback, make evidence-based decisions, remove blockers, and own outcomes end to end.

Nice To Haves

Experience in B2B SaaS, fintech, or another complex, regulated enterprise setting.
Experience with marketing automation, communications such as email and SMS, or CRM platforms in multi-tenant environments.
Experience driving AI adoption across engineering teams.
Experience building and leading distributed teams across U.S. and India locations.

Responsibilities

Lead three engineering managers and roughly half of Engineering across six product areas: Journeys and Campaigns, SMS and Communications, CRM and Lead Management, Content, Contact Service, and Mobile.
Own delivery and quality across the Applications engineering organization, including plans, sequencing, tradeoffs, staffing, and results for major programs.
Partner with the SVP, Engineering to shape technical strategy and roadmap decisions, and translate those decisions into plans and team commitments.
Lead delivery of the orchestration engine replacing seven legacy marketing automation systems, the Contact Service migration off the monolith, SMS reliability improvements, and multi-vertical readiness.
Coach engineering managers and technical leaders, develop succession depth, assign meaningful stretch opportunities, and help people grow into larger roles.
Set clear team goals and ownership, encourage visible commitments and peer accountability, address slippage early, coach performance issues, and act when coaching is not working.
Partner with People and Talent Acquisition to define role expectations, improve hiring and onboarding, calibrate interviewers, and make hiring decisions for the organization.
Build and retain strong engineering teams across U.S. and India locations, with consistent standards, access to context, and growth opportunities.
Establish blameless reviews and learning practices for incidents and people issues, and ensure reliability improvements become lasting team habits.
Lead organizational change by understanding concerns, treating constraints as design input, closing communication loops, and gaining support from skeptical senior engineers.
Strengthen collaboration among Engineering, Product, customers, and the platform; organize teams around customer problems where appropriate and represent delivery realism and technical health.
Lead AI adoption across the organization, including AI code review coverage and accepted AI-authored code; use AI tools personally and maintain appropriate review, testing, and approval standards.
Stay sufficiently close to architecture, domain models, designs, code, and incidents to identify technical drift and raise evidence-based concerns.
Partner with the SVP on execution and organizational leadership, disagree directly when appropriate, and support a united front after decisions are made.
Measure success through customer outcomes, reliable delivery, team development and retention, program milestones, and increased AI adoption.