VP of Engineering
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Job Description
About Us
We are a health-tech startup delivering real-time Agentic Voice AI solutions for healthcare providers. Our platform combines conversational AI, deep speech technology, and secure cloud infrastructure to automate patient interactions while maintaining a seamless human hand-off. We have a battle-tested Agent Assist product (10k+ concurrent calls) and are positioned to support seamless handoffs during the AI transition, doubling down on fully automated voice workflows.
The Opportunity
As the VP of Engineering, reporting directly to the Chief Product Officer (CPO), you will own the end-to-end engineering roadmap, people strategy, and technical architecture that powers our next-generation Agentic Voice platform. You will start by managing ~15 engineers (mix of FTE and contractors) and quickly scale the team to 25+ while leading the build of our entirely in-house Agentic Voice platform, building a multi‑tenant runtime, and achieving thousands of concurrent HIPAA‑compliant calls with sub-second P99 latency.
What You’ll Do
• Set the technical vision for our Voice Platform, Studio (self‑service builder), and Analytics products—making explicit, data‑driven trade‑offs that balance speed, reliability, and cost.
• Lead architecture & delivery of our in‑house conversational engine (Python, Kafka, K8s, Twilio/WebRTC) and unify shared services with our legacy Agent Assist application.
• Own execution discipline: implement lightweight metrics for cycle‑time, deploy frequency, incident rate, and cloud spend; drive predictable sprint/PI cadences.
• Grow & mentor the team: hire, coach, and retain senior ICs and future engineering managers; foster a culture of psychological safety, rapid experimentation, and design‑review rigor.
• Ensure compliance & security across HIPAA, SOC 2, and HITRUST; partner with DevOps and Data teams on audit readiness.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, Data, and Sales to translate company OKRs into technical roadmaps.
• Represent engineering in exec meetings and, as needed, with prospects and strategic partners.
What You’ll Bring
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 3+ years leading teams of 15‑40 engineers in a high‑growth environment.
• Track record of shipping real‑time voice or conversational‑AI systems (Rasa, Dialogflow, Twilio Voice, WebRTC, Amazon Lex, or similar) at scale.
• Hands-on expertise in Python, distributed systems (Kafka, Redis, Postgres), and container orchestration (Kubernetes/EKS). You still enjoy reading PRs and diving into tricky latency bugs. This is a must, you should have one of the strongest engineering minds at the company.
• Working knowledge of HIPAA/SOC 2 or other regulated‑data constraints; experience balancing security with speed.
• Experience building or migrating off third-party platforms to in-house solutions and driving the associated change‑management.
• Proven ability to recruit, develop, and inspire senior talent while nurturing early‑career engineers.
• Strong communication skills—you translate technical risk into exec‑friendly narratives and can whiteboard with ICs.
Location
• Able to be in our Chicago West Loop office 3 days per week (Tue–Thu core collaboration days). Hybrid flexibility for deep‑focus work.
