VP, Engineering

Simulmedia is seeking an experienced VP of Engineering to join our team to lead our engineering team as we strengthen our platform and deliver new insights and analytics capabilities within our next-generation projects.

Our engineering org is 30+ people, fully Ukraine-based, and part of a broader 65-person Ukraine team that spans product, data science, design, and marketing. The VP, Engineering leads that engineering org and is a member of the executive leadership team, reporting directly to the Chief Product & Technology Officer.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will set technical direction, build culture, and contribute directly to innovation through prototyping and architectural work alongside your team.

What You'll Own:

• Define and drive the engineering roadmap across a multi-product platform, ensuring architectural decisions are coherent, durable, and tied to business outcomes
• Serve as the senior technical voice in cross-functional planning, shaping product and data decisions alongside peers in Product, Data Science, and Design
• Set and maintain standards for code quality, system design, and operational reliability, including the legacy systems and architectural debt that are already in production and need active stewardship
• Own production reliability end-to-end, including 24/7 incident response and escalation. This role is accountable for uptime and operational health across a live, multi-product platform.
• Build a culture where architecture decisions, service ownership, runbooks, and onboarding materials are written down, kept current, and treated as engineering deliverables

Developer Experience and Agentic Engineering

• Own the engineering toolchain as the platform for how work gets done: CI/CD pipelines, release infrastructure, error tracking, and the agentic development environment your team operates within
• Lead the org's transition to AI-assisted and agentic development practices, defining where and how AI agents participate in the development lifecycle, from code generation to testing to deployment, and where engineers stay in the loop

AI-Native Product Development

• Lead the design and delivery of AI and agentic capabilities within the products: systems that monitor, reason, and act on behalf of users
• Prototype and build proof-of-concepts directly to validate ideas and set direction for the team
• Build engineering practices around LLM integration, agentic workflows, and AI-driven automation at the product level
• Develop team-wide judgment on where AI systems operate autonomously and where human review is required, and design products accordingly

Note: this is an active and required capability for this role. Candidates should have shipped something in this space, not just a point of view about it.

Team Leadership

• Lead and develop 30+ engineers organized across: Backend Engineering, Full Stack Engineering, Data Engineering, Infrastructure and DevOps, QA and Architecture
• Grow engineering leads into accountable, autonomous owners with strong technical judgment
• Build a culture of product engineering — where engineers own outcomes, operate with high autonomy, and are accountable to users and business results, not delivery processes.
• Build a high-trust, async-first operating culture across a fully distributed, Ukraine-based team

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with Product, Data Science, Design, and Commercial leadership as a full peer in executive discussions
• Communicate engineering strategy and status clearly to the CPTO, CEO, and board when required
• Proactively surface risks, decisions, and opportunities across the organization

Qualifications:

Background

• 8+ years in engineering leadership, with meaningful time at the VP level or equivalent scope
• Experience at a product-led company, with a track record of owning outcomes across the full software lifecycle
• Experience leading and developing distributed engineering teams within a global organization
• Familiarity with the operational realities of multi-product platforms: shared infrastructure, competing priorities, and the tradeoffs that come with scale, including the legacy systems that are part of any platform that has been in production for years

AI and Agentic Systems

• Demonstrated experience shipping products where AI or agentic systems are in the critical path
• A clear point of view on how to design products around AI capabilities responsibly and effectively
• Ability to prototype and build directly, and to use that work to lead the team technically

Technology

Our stack includes: Ruby, Go, TypeScript, Python, React, Next.js, Databricks, PostgreSQL, AWS, Kubernetes, and GitHub Actions. TypeScript and Next.js are central to the product roadmap and hands-on familiarity with both is expected. The ability to reason well about systems and lead credibly across a broad technical surface matters more than deep experience in every layer of the stack.

Communication

• Business-level written and spoken English is required. This role involves direct participation in English-language executive discussions, partner conversations, and external communications.
• Clear, precise, and proactive communication across all levels of the organization

Ways of Working

• Proactive and systems-oriented: you identify what needs attention and act
• Hands-on: you contribute through prototypes, design documents, and architectural review
• A member of the executive team first, with a remit that extends beyond the engineering organization