VP of Engineering

Nace AI•Palo Alto, CA

4d•Onsite

About The Position

We are hiring a VP of Engineering to lead and scale our engineering organization. This is one of the senior roles at Nace AI. You will partner directly with our CEO and CTO to translate our research and product vision into reliable, enterprise-grade systems — and build the team, processes, and culture that make world-class execution repeatable. In this role, you will own engineering delivery end to end: planning, execution, quality, and velocity across a distributed team of researchers and engineers. You will be equally comfortable setting technical direction in an architecture review and unblocking a critical customer deployment.

Requirements

10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years leading engineering teams at high-growth startups or enterprise software companies
Proven track record scaling an engineering org from ~10 to 50+ engineers while maintaining velocity and quality
Deep technical fluency in modern ML/AI systems, distributed infrastructure, and enterprise SaaS — you can go toe-to-toe with senior ICs on architecture
Experience shipping and operating products for enterprise customers with strict security and compliance requirements; fintech, audit, or regulated-industry background is a strong plus
Professional proficiency in both English and Russian, enabling effective collaboration across our distributed, multilingual engineering team
Strong operational instincts: you build lightweight processes that create leverage, not bureaucracy
Exceptional judgment on hiring — you have built teams people want to join and stay on
Based in or willing to relocate to the Bay Area; this role is on-site in Palo Alto

Nice To Haves

Experience with LLM-based products, agentic systems, or applied research environments
Prior experience as a founder, founding engineer, or first VP of Engineering
Familiarity with financial audit, accounting, or compliance domains

Responsibilities

Lead, grow, and retain a high-caliber engineering organization spanning ML, platform, and product engineering
Own delivery: set roadmaps with product and research leadership, drive execution, and hold a high bar for quality and speed
Partner with the CTO on system architecture, technical strategy, and build-vs-buy decisions
Establish engineering processes that scale — planning cycles, code review standards, incident response, and on-call practices
Ensure our systems meet the reliability, security, and compliance expectations of enterprise financial customers (SOC 2, data governance, auditability)
Recruit senior engineering talent and design the org structure for our next stage of growth
Represent engineering with customers, partners, and investors as needed
Manage effectively across a globally distributed team and time zones