VP of Engineering

About Tiny Health

Tiny Health is advancing lifelong health, from the first 1,000 days to the last, and addressing chronic disease through precision microbiome science. Founded in 2020 and built by microbiome scientists and physicians, our testing platform reveals whether your microbiome is trending toward resilience or imbalances using shotgun metagenomics, proprietary AI, and one of the world's largest longitudinal datasets. Trusted by families and health practitioners alike, our research-backed gut and vaginal tests are redefining the microbiome as a cornerstone of personalized health through every life stage. Learn more at tinyhealth.com and poweredbytiny.com.

The Opportunity

As our first VP of Engineering, you will own engineering at Tiny Health end to end. Our team of roughly a dozen engineers works across two pods and has grown without a dedicated leader, with ownership over technical direction, architecture, hiring, and people management currently fragmented between various people. You will bring all of that under one roof: lead the people, set and ship a clear technical and architecture strategy, and stand up the performance and growth systems a maturing engineering org needs.

We are looking for a hands-on leader who is as comfortable in the codebase as in a 1:1, someone who can earn the trust of senior engineers, develop them into the tech leads we do not yet have, and represent engineering at the executive table. You will be the sole voice for engineering among business and product leaders, partnering closely with product and company leadership to get the right architecture and scaling work prioritized and delivered. You must be able to deliver highly technical information in lay business terms, communicating risk, reward and impact effectively to non-technical audiences. This role reports directly to our co-founder and Chief Growth Officer.

What You’ll Do

• Become the terminal owner of engineering. Resolve technical and people decisions by convening the right people and acting on a strong point of view, rather than routing decisions upward.

• Build an engineering performance system that measures real individual impact beyond ticket volume, accounting for quality, reliability, and the non-project work people absorb, and use it to surface and act on both your strongest and your struggling engineers.

• Set and continuously evolve the architecture and scaling strategy, informed by product and executive context, and use your influence to get that work onto pod roadmaps and shipped, so every pod is executing against a shared technical vision.

• Represent engineering at executive tables. Keep executive stakeholders and colleagues informed of decisions within engineering and product that have downstream impacts across marketing, business development, operations and partnerships. Be able to collaborate effectively cross-departmentally.

• Build the team: find where the gaps are, hire people who hold the bar, give every engineer a clear growth path, develop existing engineers into tech leads, and make sure each pod is resourced to deliver its roadmap.

Qualifications

Required

• Have directly managed and led engineers, including running 1:1s, performance, and individual growth.

• Operate as a hands-on builder who still writes and reviews code and works directly in the system, not a pure people-leader.

• Can engage senior engineers on architecture and scaling tradeoffs at their depth and earn their respect.

• Experience serving as the sole voice for engineering among business and product leaders. Take a clear, bold position in the best interest of both engineering and the company, command the tradeoffs, and move the room through reasoning rather than authority.

Preferred

• Have run an engineering org or team of comparable size (roughly 10 to 12 engineers).

• Have scaled a team from a single- or two-pod structure into a larger org with tech leads and engineering managers.

• A track record of developing engineers and leveling existing talent up into senior or lead roles.

• Have personally sourced, closed, and onboarded engineers who became A-players.

• Experience in a healthcare, HIPAA, or SOC 2 compliant environment.

• Structure messy, ambiguous data into a conclusion you can defend.

How we work

• Remote-First Company: our working hours follow a 2 hour window from 9 am - 6 pm CST

• Driven by an ambitious mission: we're reinventing how we should think about wellness from the first 1,000 days to the last

• Shape what we build, not just how we build it: we prioritize experimentation with taking ownership, and moving fast

• No hidden agendas: we operate with full transparency because when everyone's working from the same honest picture, you spend less time on politics and more time on impact

• High standards, human culture: we hold ourselves to a high bar and do it alongside a team who can laugh at themselves and make the hard days genuinely enjoyable

Our Values

1. Learn fast, be better (root cause analysis)

   What that looks like: When a stakeholder gives constructive criticism to a test result, instead of just apologizing and moving on, you dig into why it happened and update the process so the feedback is not received again.

2. Be relentlessly resourceful (be scrappy)

   What that looks like: When a customer asks a question about our science, you you spend time digging through our docs and filtering through Slack for previous replies before pinging the team. You also know not to burn a whole day stuck, so you ask for help with a clear summary of what you've already tried.

3. Think like an owner (ownership)

   What that looks like: When you notice customer engagement is dropping, you don't shrug it off as another team's problem - you flag it, dig into the numbers, and bring a fix, because you're hungry to see the whole company win, not just your own tasks hit their targets.

4. Act with honesty and empathy (radical candor)

   What that looks like: When a colleague shares an idea that carries real risk, challenge in the moment and do it with kindness - don’t vent about it afterward in a side conversation.

5. Delight people by anticipating their needs (create raving experiences)

   What that looks like: You put yourselves in the shoes of the customer or collaborator before presenting an idea, process, or proposal. Think ahead about what their pain and gain points are, and curate your communication to address their needs.