VP, Engineering

The role

We're also growing from a mortgage platform into one that serves banking, wealth, and insurance, and the products this role owns are where customers will feel that growth first. The work ahead is significant: a new orchestration engine that replaces seven legacy marketing automation systems, a migration of our Contact Service off the monolith, and lasting improvements to SMS reliability.

AI is changing what engineering work looks like. More of the mechanical work is being done by tools; more of the value is in judgment, review, customer understanding, and the ability to lead change. Most companies will add AI and get complexity. A few will turn it into a real operating advantage. We intend to be one of the few, and that comes down to people and culture more than technology.

We're building our Engineering and Product culture around three principles. You'll be the person who turns them into daily habits:

Reality is the referee. Decisions settle on customer outcomes and evidence, not title, opinion, or "that's how my last company did it." If something is working, we double down. If it isn't, we stop.

All jobs

VP, Engineering

Total Expert, Dallas, TX

Posted pay

$240K–$280K

a year

Compared with similar jobs

This base pay is above the median for director-level software engineering jobs in other US places.

Median: $239K a year
Other jobs in the group: 226

We compare the middle of each posted range. This is base pay as posted. The group does not include this job.

Location: Dallas, TX
Work type: Hybrid
Level: Director+, manager
Experience: 15+ years
Posted: Oct 6, 2026
Last check: 8 h ago
Job type: Software engineering

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Total Expert

Open tech jobs: 4
With posted pay: 100%

About Total Expert: funding, hiring and pay

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About Total Expert: funding, hiring and pay

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The role

We're building our Engineering and Product culture around three principles. You'll be the person who turns them into daily habits:

Reality is the referee. Decisions settle on customer outcomes and evidence, not title, opinion, or "that's how my last company did it." If something is working, we double down. If it isn't, we stop.

What you will do

What you'll be doing

Develop leaders. Coach your managers and the technical leaders under them to know each person's superpowers and weak spots, manage to strengths, and use real stretch assignments to grow people faster. Build a bench so that key roles have successors. Expect this to be where most of your time goes.
Hold teams accountable, with intent, not oversight. Set clear goals and make sure every team knows what it owns and what it committed to. Let teams decide how to get there, then hold them to it. Replace status meetings and approval chains with visible commitments, peer accountability, and direct customer feedback. When something slips, raise it early and directly. Fix the system first; when the issue is performance, coach it, and act when coaching isn't working.
Shape the technical strategy, then deliver it. Bring a strong point of view to architecture, technical strategy, and roadmap decisions, with the SVP making the final call. Then translate those decisions into plans and team commitments across all six product areas. Balance the big architectural programs against the everyday delivery, reliability, and customer commitments that come with owning the products customers see. Stay close enough to the architecture, domain models, and key design decisions to spot drift early and raise concerns with evidence.
Raise the talent bar, with our People team. Partner with People and Talent Acquisition on how we hire and onboard engineers. Define what great looks like for each role, make sure engineering interviewers are trained and calibrated, and own the hiring decisions for your org. Hire for learning speed, ownership, and low ego over pedigree.
Grow and keep great engineers. Own how engineers and managers in your organization develop, advance, and stay. Build one team across our US and India locations on purpose, with the same standards, the same access to context, and the same paths to grow. Make Engineering a place strong people want to join and don't want to leave.
Make reliability and learning structural. Run blameless reviews on incidents and on people issues like attrition, missed hires, and engagement drops. Land the guardrails that prevent repeat incidents, especially on the communication products where customers notice failures first. Make sure every fix lands in how we work, not in a document nobody reads.
Lead change well. Bring people along on hard changes by understanding what they're protecting, treating constraints as design input, and closing every loop you open. Turn skeptical senior engineers into champions. Replacing seven legacy systems will test this.
Get engineers closer to customers and Product. Organize around customer problems where it makes sense, and build tight loops between customer-facing engineers, Product, and the platform. Our application products are where Product has the strongest opinions and customers have the loudest voice. You'll be the engineering voice that keeps delivery realism and technical health in the conversation.
Lead Engineering through the AI shift. Help our engineers move toward higher-judgment work as AI tools take on more of the mechanical work, while protecting quality through clear review, testing, and approval standards. Own AI adoption across your organization, including AI code review coverage and accepted AI-authored code, and use the tools yourself. Treat it as a culture shift, not a tooling rollout.
Partner with the SVP, Engineering. Own execution and the people side of Applications so the SVP can spend more time on technology and strategy across Engineering. Bring your own view on technical direction, disagree directly when it matters, and present a united front once a decision is made.

What success looks like

First 90 days: You know every manager and their teams. You've seen real work, real incidents, and real customer escalations, not just dashboards. You and the SVP have agreed on how you'll split the work. You've shared a written read on the org's strengths, gaps, top people risks, and top delivery risks, and every team has clear, visible commitments.
6 months: Blameless reviews and a working dissent practice are in place. The SMS reliability guardrails are live and teams use them. Working with the People team, our engineering interview process is updated and interviewers are calibrated. Every manager can name each report's strengths and weak spots. The orchestration engine and Contact Service migration have plans you and the SVP trust, and they're tracking to them.
12 months: Regretted attrition is down, new engineering hires are ramping well, and at least two people have been promoted into bigger scope. The major programs are hitting the milestones you committed to, and customer-facing incidents are down. AI adoption is measurably up across your teams. The SVP's time is going to technology and strategy, not day-to-day delivery.

What you need

Typically 15+ years building and operating enterprise SaaS, including 5+ years leading engineering organizations through managers, ideally in B2B SaaS, fintech, or another complex, regulated enterprise setting.
A track record of building strong engineering teams, including distributed and global teams: setting a high hiring bar in partnership with recruiting, and developing engineers and managers into bigger roles. You can name the people you've grown and where they are now.
A record of holding teams to their commitments while keeping their trust, including turning a team around after missed deliveries or production incidents.
A strong technical background, with hands-on experience in customer-facing applications, event-driven and distributed systems at scale, and legacy modernization. Experience with marketing automation, communications (email and SMS), or CRM platforms in multi-tenant environments is a strong plus.
Technical credibility with engineers. You're as comfortable in a design review or an incident review as you are in a roadmap conversation with Product. You don't need to be the best architect in the room. You need to understand the architecture well enough to shape it and deliver it, and you need to build the room.
Experience leading large, multi-team programs from design through production delivery.
Real examples of leading change through resistance, including winning over respected senior people who didn't want the change.
A history of partnering with a strong technical leader, helping shape their strategy, executing it well, and making them more effective.
Personal use of AI tools in your engineering work, a point of view on how AI changes engineering teams, roles, and quality practices, and ideally experience driving that adoption across teams.

How you work

Our four core values, and what they mean in this role

Customer obsession. Everything starts with the customer. You know how they use what your teams build, you get engineers in front of them, and you measure success by the value customers get, not features shipped.
Grit and resilience. Hard programs, production incidents, and setbacks don't knock you off course. You own outcomes end to end, give credit away, talk about failures plainly, and keep your teams steady.
Speed. You move fast and help your teams do the same. You decide quickly on good evidence, remove blockers, and change course when the evidence says so.
Excellence. You hold a high bar for people, code, and reliability, and you're direct and fair about it. You set clear expectations, give feedback early, and follow up, so people always know where they stand.

VP, Engineering

The role

VP, Engineering

The role

What you will do

What you'll be doing

What success looks like

What you need

Our four core values, and what they mean in this role

What this role isn't

Pay and benefits

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