Vice President of Engineering

The Mandate: Execute at Scale Lead with Depth

Search Atlas is a Silicon Valley anomaly: we bootstrapped to $32M ARR without a dollar of VC funding. We built systems that crawl millions of pages daily and serve Fortune 500s with 99.99% uptime. Now we are pioneering Agentic MarketingAI systems that dont just analyze data; they act on it autonomously.

We dont need a spreadsheet jockey. We need a VP of Engineering who possesses the technical rigor of a Staff IC and the strategic vision of a Founder. You will own the execution engine that takes us to $100M ARR. You wont be trapped in conference rooms; youll be in the trenches of architecture reviewing critical-path code and mentoring the next generation of elite engineers.

Your Arena: Two-Mode Leadership

Mode 1: Technical Gravitas & Architecture (40% High-Leverage Execution)

• Guardian of the Critical Path: You arent shipping routine tickets but you own the final architectural blueprint. When our Celery task architecture needs to scale to billions of background jobs you design the solution.

• Code Review Authority: You set the gold standard. Your presence in PR reviews isnt to micromanage but to ensure distributed systems anti-patterns and N1 queries never see the light of production.

• Forensics & Resilience: When the system faces extreme load you lead the diagnosis. You use Datadog Sentry and Grafana as forensic tools to maintain sub-100ms latency across our agentic stack.

Mode 2: Engineering Velocity & Culture (60% Organizational Scaling)

• Elite Operations: Evolve our 100 engineer organization into a world-class unit. You implement processes that increase velocity by removing friction not by adding bureaucracy. TDD CI/CD and trunk-based development are your religion.

• Leader of Leaders: Mentor Tech Leads and Principal Engineers through action. Your team should grow faster by watching you solve a hard problem on a whiteboard than they would in a year of seminars.

• Talent Magnet: Build a culture that the top 1% of SF engineers quit their jobs to join. You know how to identify operators and filter out tourists within a 15-minute conversation.

The Technical Reality (The Stack You Own)

• Backend: Python 3 Django REST Framework Celery (Async processing at massive scale).

• Data: PostgreSQL (Transactional optimization) ClickHouse (Analytics) Elasticsearch (Search) Redis.

• Infra: Kubernetes Docker Microservicesmanaging terabytes of data and sub-100ms latency requirements.

• AI/ML: LLM orchestration agentic systems architecture and vector databases in production environments.

Who You Are

• The Profile: 10 years of shipping production code with 3 years leading organizations of 50 engineers. You have the title of a VP but the current sharp skills of a Staff Engineer.

• Proven Track Record: Youve successfully scaled SaaS platforms from $20M to $100M ARR in capital-efficient environments.

• Shipping Obsession: You measure cycle time deployment frequency and MTTR. You hate waste and love aggressive iteration.

• SF-Based: You understand that high-bandwidth leadership happens in person. You thrive in whiteboard wars and rapid face-to-face iteration.

The Partnership & Compensation

The Package (SF 2026 Executive Standard):

• Base: $200000 $425000 (Based on technical depth and leadership track record).

• Equity: Meaningful ownership in a profitable high-growth bootstrapped rocket ship.

• Benefits: Premium Health/Dental/Vision Unlimited PTO Paid Parental Leave.

• The Edge: Company-paid Lasik (visual clarity for the mission) $500/quarter professional development budget and a zero-politics environment.

The Culture:

• Ship-or-Die Velocity: We deploy daily. We optimize hourly.

• Ownership Cult: Engineers own features end-to-end. We dont have project managers to shield you; we have owners who ship.

• Radical Candor: Direct feedback brutal honesty and extremely high expectations.