VP, Engineering

AiChat is a leading multi-channel chatbot solution for enterprise. Our vision is to have every business have a smart and business-oriented chatbot communication platform to drive sales and customer engagement.

As VP Engineering at AiChat, you will be responsible for leading our team of developers and QA aligned with specific mission and business objectives that directly impact our customers. You will be expected to manage your team to deliver high-quality results while ensuring alignment with our company's technical vision and strategy. This role reports to the Chief of Product, with a possible career trajectory to CTO.

Expected Collaborations

• Collaborate with Product Managers to align on roadmaps and goals/KPI for your team.
• Provide solutions and analysis of future scale and expansion opportunities.
• Align with Chief Product Officer, DevOps, and AI to ensure your team's work aligns with the engineering strategy and technical vision.
• Work with Solution Architects or pre-sales in defining feasible solutions.
• Coordinate with Technical Recruiters to hire new team members.
• Collaborate with the AI team to adopt ML and AI into products managed by you.

Tasks and Responsibilities Delivery

• Ensure projects are tracked and team follows project management guidelines.
• Assign qualified project owners to execute properly scoped, planned, and delivered projects.
• Understand team capacity for projects and ensure a steady pace without burnout.
• Ensure project deliverables meet engineering standards.
• Align with cross-team initiatives to avoid blocking other teams.
• Manage stakeholders' expectations via status updates and demos on key projects.
• Address risks and dependencies early in projects to avoid delays.
• Track and measure engineering productivity, spot bottlenecks, and evolve processes to make the team more effective.
• Ensure dependencies are managed and cross-team projects are synchronized.

Strategy and Alignment

• Define technical vision and delivery strategy against business and product goals and clearly communicate to the team.
• Provide context to team about company goals, product and technical strategy, key metrics, and resources.
• Align regularly with stakeholders on team priorities and goals.
• Provide technical direction to projects and systems by working with lead developers.
• Set ambitious yet achievable goals/KPIs that focus the team on high-impact outcomes.
• Conduct regular team huddles to maintain and evolve engineering practices, policies, and guidelines on people growth and management, recruitment, onboarding, and organization.

Talent

• Mentor and coach team members, manage appraisals, and handle high and low performers effectively.
• Provide timely feedback and recognize team members' contributions.
• Create growth opportunities by growing ownership and sponsorship for team members.
• Spot needs and gaps in knowledge and expertise and hire new talents.
• Set up effective onboarding and handle offboarding of team members.
• Grow leaders by ensuring team members are given problems rather than tasks.

Culture

• Ensure high team morale and happiness, and promote participation in company activities.
• Establish and maintain an inclusive and diverse environment.
• Ensure strong and positive collaboration within the team.
• Create a culture of ownership, empowerment, and autonomy aligned with company values.
• Establish a growth mindset culture where people feel safe to make mistakes and learn from them.

Technical Excellence

• Review and ensure solutions consider key cross-cutting concerns like security, compliance, reliability, and performance.
• Maintain and evolve internal and external knowledge bases and technical documentation.
• Ensure systems owned by the team are operational and healthy.
• Establish support practices and guidelines to handle bug reports, requests, and incidents.
• Deliver solutions with high technical quality, upholding quality standards.
• Provide technical leadership, ensuring engineering principles and practices are well established.
• Nurture technical knowledge and innovation to stay up to date with the latest developments.

What You Will Bring

• Over 10 years of leading software engineering for enterprise or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), with experience in product development of at least 2 years.
• Experience designing and implementing cloud-based services.
• Experience with Full stack development and Web Apps.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills.
• Bachelor’s Degree and/or relevant work experience with a strong computer engineering background.
• At least 3 years of leadership experience for VP Engineering.
• Excellent technical, business, and organizational competence that enables you to grow an engineering organization for VP Engineering.