VP of Engineering

Freed•San Francisco, CA

14h

About The Position

We are hiring a VP of Engineering to build and lead Freed's high-velocity, AI-native engineering organization. Your mandate is to help Freed ship ambitious healthcare AI products faster, with clearer ownership, stronger technical leadership, and consistently high product quality. This is not a traditional engineering executive role focused only on process, people management, or keeping systems running. You will turn product ambition into an engineering organization that moves quickly, protects clinician trust, and makes hard tradeoffs explicit. You will lead engineering managers and technical leaders across multiple product areas, partner directly with the CEO, CTO, Product, Design, GTM, and Clinical leaders, and help shape how AI-native software teams operate. We need a technical operator, not a detached manager. You do not need to be the best engineer in the room or personally own production features, but you must stay close to implementation reality: reading code, evaluating technical tradeoffs, using modern AI coding tools directly, and challenging strong engineers from real technical context.

Requirements

Experience leading high-performing engineering teams in fast-moving startup or high-growth product environments
Strong technical judgment across product architecture, backend systems, frontend systems, infrastructure, reliability, security, and developer productivity
Hands-on fluency with modern AI development workflows and enough coding ability to prototype, inspect, debug, or validate technical work with AI assistance
A track record of developing engineering managers, technical leaders, and high-performing ICs
Strong product and business judgment, with the ability to contribute beyond engineering to roadmap, GTM, customer, and company strategy decisions
Clear operating instincts around org design, accountability, prioritization, planning, and execution cadence
A high hiring bar and the ability to attract, assess, and close exceptional engineering talent
Direct, high-context communication and comfort operating with urgency while maintaining quality and trust

Nice To Haves

Experience building AI-native engineering organizations or internal AI developer workflows
Experience with healthcare, regulated software, security, compliance, or enterprise readiness
Experience scaling engineering teams through multiple stages of company growth
Meaningful earlier-career IC experience in product or infrastructure engineering
Familiarity with observability, incident response, platform engineering, and developer productivity systems

Responsibilities

Own engineering velocity, execution quality, and organizational performance across product pods and platform/infrastructure work
Build and develop a strong engineering leadership layer, including EMs, tech leads, and senior ICs
Partner with the CTO and technical leaders on technical direction, reliability, security, developer experience, and architecture tradeoffs
Champion AI-native engineering workflows, including agentic coding, AI-assisted review, test maintenance, production triage, and rapid prototyping
Create pragmatic systems for planning, PR review, design review, testing, incident response, and cross-pod coordination without slowing the company down
Partner deeply with Product, Design, GTM, Clinical, and Customer Success to keep engineering aligned with clinician needs, company strategy, and market learning
Lead through ambiguity, incidents, organizational change, and difficult resource tradeoffs with clarity and urgency