VP of Engineering
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 25, 2026. First seen by Alion on Oct 23, 2026. WhyHireWrong scores B on the Alion truth index.
The Role
You will be the most senior engineer on the product and the person who decides how it's built. In year one you will write a large share of the code yourself. As the team grows, you will take over technical leadership of the platform: architecture, engineering standards and hiring. For the right person this is a clear path to CTO.
You will work directly with the founders and the model research team. You are the link between a frontier model and a product that safety-critical engineers rely on.
What You Will Own
Architecture: frontend, backend, data and infrastructure, including build-vs-buy decisions.
Product delivery: ship quickly with product and early users, who are control and embedded engineers.
Model integration layer: inference serving, prompt and context management, tool use, streaming, evaluation hooks and fallbacks. New model releases plug in without a rewrite.
Trust workflows: traceability from requirements to code, diffing and review, test execution and audit trails, so engineers can verify AI-generated code.
Engineering foundations: CI/CD, observability, security, access control and cost control for GPU-backed workloads.
Enterprise readiness: SSO, data isolation and on-prem or private-cloud deployment for regulated industries.
Team: hire, mentor and lead the first engineers, and define how they work.
Requirements
Must have
10+ years building and shipping production software, with real depth in both frontend and backend.
Strong TypeScript and React (or an equivalent modern frontend), plus at least one backend language: Python, Go or TypeScript/Node.
Founding, lead or principal engineer on a product taken from early stage to paying customers.
LLM features shipped to production: model APIs or self-hosted inference, streaming, evaluation, and cost/latency trade-offs.
Cloud skills on AWS, GCP or Azure, plus containers and infrastructure as code.
Sound architectural judgement: you know when to move fast and when a shortcut costs too much.
Experience hiring and leading engineers, or a clear appetite to do so.
Clear written and spoken English, and comfort working with founders, researchers and customers.
Nice to have
Compliance exposure: SOC 2, ISO 27001 or FedRAMP.
Developer tools, IDEs, code editors (Monaco, VS Code extensions) or code analysis tooling.
Serving custom or fine-tuned models (vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, Triton) and GPU infrastructure.
Rust or C/C++.
Selling to and deploying in regulated or security-conscious enterprises.
Offer
CTO-level ownership of a product where frontier AI meets real-world engineering.
A clear path to the CTO role as the company grows.
Competitive salary and meaningful CTO-level equity.
Direct work with a founding team that combines AI research with hands-on experience building high-voltage and electric drive systems.
Hybrid working from the London office, with a full benefits package.