VP of Engineering

Core Responsibilities

• Architectural & Engineering Leadership: Partner with the CTO to design enterprise-grade systems that seamlessly blend event-driven architectures, stream processing, workflow orchestration, and AI pipelines. Build and mentor a high-performing engineering team, creating a culture where engineers grow while delivering exceptional results. Your architectural reviews are teaching moments; your pair programming sessions demonstrate AI-amplified development
• AI-Native Development Culture: Champion the use of AI in every aspect of development. At Advocate, we believe in human intellectual amplification through AI partnership \- we'll never be "vibe coders." You'll establish workflows and practices that make AI collaboration second nature for the entire team, teaching others to achieve 10x productivity through AI partnership
• Platform Evolution: Design systems that handle data changing over time through human and machine steps. As humans review data and AI generates insights, your architecture must elegantly handle cascading changes while maintaining perfect audit trails. Transform existing systems into clean, scalable patterns while maintaining 99.99% uptime
• Simplicity Through Sophistication: Create architectures that are profoundly simple despite underlying complexity. The best solution to a 10-component problem might be 3 elegant abstractions, not 20 micro-services

Technical Excellence

• AI & Architecture Mastery : You've developed a profoundly effective personal workflow with Claude Code, Codex, GPT-5, and other AI systems. You understand the difference between "vibe coding" and true AI partnership. You're equally fluent in distributed systems patterns (event sourcing, CQRS, saga patterns), know when to use Kafka vs. Kinesis vs. neither, and understand AWS services deeply without being dependent on them
• Framework & Performance Expertise: Experienced with modern orchestration (Temporal, Airflow), data processing (Spark, Flink), and application frameworks \- understanding their internals, not just usage. You predict bottlenecks before they exist and design security-first systems where protection is inherent, not added

Cognitive Approach

• Systems Thinker: You see connections others miss \- between data points, algorithms, and human processes. You question every assumption from first principles. Your designs start from fundamental truths, not industry conventions
• Right, A Lot: Your instincts about what will work are correct more often than not. You have a track record of successful bets on architectural decisions that seemed risky but proved transformative
• Extreme Ownership: You're obsessively driven to solve problems. When you take on a challenge, it becomes yours completely. The problem stays with you in the shower, on walks, in dreams. You wake up at 3 AM with breakthrough ideas and immediately test them
• Intellectual Humility: You understand AI may produce insights beyond human comprehension and build systems that account for this. You admit when wrong and change course quickly
• Communication Clarity: You can explain distributed consensus to an intern and data sharding to a board member. Your architecture documents are clear, visual, and impossible to misinterpret

Leadership Excellence

• Technical Influence: Engineers follow your vision because your designs are obviously correct. You lead through clarity and competence
• Team Builder: You identify talent, develop potential, and create teams greater than the sum of their parts. You elevate every engineer, teaching them to think architecturally and collaborate with AI effectively
• Decisive Under Uncertainty: You make architectural decisions with 70% information and adjust as you learn. You build consensus without compromise

Unique Qualifications

• Interdisciplinary Background: Your expertise spans multiple fields - software engineering, data science, user experience, organizational behavior
• Speed & Outcome Obsession: You measure iterations in hours and days. A working solution today beats perfection next quarter Invention Track Record: You've created novel architectural patterns and think in terms of "what's possible" not "what's been done"

Technical Environment

• Event-driven architectures (Kafka/Kinesis/EventBridge)
• Multi-tier data platforms (Aurora, DynamoDB, OpenSearch, S3)
• Orchestration (Temporal, Step Functions, custom engines)
• Real-time processing (Flink/Kinesis Analytics)
• Container orchestration (ECS/EKS)
• Infrastructure as Code (CDK/Terraform)
• AI/ML pipelines throughout You'll have full authority to evaluate, adopt, or replace any part of our stack.
• AI Orchestration (LlamaIndex, LangChain)