VP, Software Engineering

VP, Software Engineering (Guild)

Lead Guild’s product, platform, and foundational engineering organization to plan, build, and ship reliable software while pursuing growth initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Set technical and organizational direction across product, platform, and foundational engineering by translating business strategy into an execution roadmap.
• Own planning and delivery: estimation, release readiness, incident response; improve predictability and throughput with lightweight processes.
• Balance reliability with growth bets: decide when to harden core systems and pay down tech debt vs. fund experiments for member and employer-partner growth.
• Own internal platform & foundational engineering including DevOps, shared services, CI/CD, and testing so product teams can focus on product delivery.
• Drive outcomes through ambiguity: bring clarity to complex problems, make decisions with incomplete information, and keep teams focused on measurable impact.
• Develop leaders and talent: coach and grow Directors and Engineering Managers, provide frequent actionable feedback, and create stretch opportunities.
• Build an inclusive, sustainable engineering culture with psychological safety and a modern (AI-forward) way of working.
• Partner cross-functionally and represent engineering with executives and vendors (e.g., AWS, Auth0) to align technical investment with company priorities.

Requirements

• VP-level experience leading a multi-team engineering organization across product and platform domains with ownership of outcomes.
• People leadership at manager-of-managers level: set standards, drive execution, remove blockers, provide actionable feedback, and build psychologically safe teams.
• Comfort operating in ambiguity: simplify complexity, make pragmatic trade-offs, and orient teams around measurable impact.
• Deep technical credibility to evaluate architecture and earn trust of senior engineers; judgment to balance reliability/cost with growth opportunities.
• Strong cross-functional partnership with Product, Design, and engineering peers; clear communication of strategy and trade-offs to executives.

Preferred Competencies

• Experience scaling consumer or B2B2C growth product engineering and/or internal developer platforms in high-growth environments.
• Familiarity with a modern AWS serverless stack (e.g., Lambda, Aurora).
• Familiarity with GraphQL and AI-native tooling.