VP of Engineering

📍 Location: Downtown Austin, TX ; Remote considered for the right candidate
💼 Type: Full-time, Executive Leadership
💰 Compensation: World-class executive pay + equity + premium benefits

We’ve built a $35M+ business with just 70 people by hiring smart, disciplined, high-output teammates who act fast and own outcomes. Our CEO is a founding engineer who still understands our entire stack in detail and has run the engineering function for the past 15 years. Now, as we scale further, we’re looking for a VP of Engineering who can step into that seat — leading the technical organization with the same rigor, discipline, and depth that got us here.

This is a rare opportunity: an executive seat in a profitable, founder-led SaaS company where engineering is the heart of the business, not a support function. You’ll inherit a lean, talented, highly respected team and take ownership of the systems that serve thousands of requests per second, move petabytes of data, and power mission-critical supply chains for global brands.

Our goal is to hire someone in our downtown Austin, TX office, and have you sit right next to our CEO. We are also open to remote candidates, but our strong preference is going to be for someone who is able to be in our office.

Strategic Mandate and Clear Scope

The VP of Engineering will own the engineering organization end-to-end: product development, infrastructure, DevOps, QA, and security. This role is not about sitting above the work — it is about leading from within. The expectation is clear: you will be the most technically capable engineer on the team.

That means diving into Ruby on Rails at scale, understanding high-volume MySQL and Redis clusters, guiding React and React Native teams on user-facing applications, and collaborating with infrastructure engineers who treat Chef, Terraform, and CI/CD pipelines as product systems in their own right.

You’ll also drive technical integration of acquisitions, quickly unifying codebases and systems into a single stack. This is not about running multiple silos — it’s about building one cohesive, disciplined engineering organization.

Why This Role is Exciting

• Founder-Led, Engineering-First Culture: Our CEO is an engineer, our org is flat, and decisions are made with product quality in mind. At Files.com, engineering is the core of the business.
• Modern Polyglot Stack: Ruby is the backbone of the platform, but we run production systems in Golang, Java, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, and React/React Native. Our engineers choose the right tool for the job and contribute across the stack.
• Scale and Impact: Our systems process hundreds of millions of API calls daily and power mission-critical workflows for Fortune 500s. We run petabytes of data through bleeding-edge MySQL and Redis clusters, and we spend nearly $2M annually on AWS infrastructure.
• Infrastructure as Product: We don’t “keep the lights on.” Our infrastructure engineers build proprietary synchronization engines, observability tools, and automation systems using Chef, Terraform, and GitLab CI/CD. This is product work, not firefighting.
• Security as Core DNA: We treat security as an engineering discipline, not a compliance checkbox. Vulnerabilities are patched quickly, bugs don’t fester, and accountability is shared by every engineer.
• Ownership Without Silos: Engineers here own features end-to-end — design, build, deploy, monitor, and maintain. The VP of Engineering sets the tone by being hands-on and technically authoritative.
• Career-Defining Seat: This is one of the few VP roles where executive authority and deep technical scope overlap. You’ll architect the future of the product, lead a respected team, and work directly with the founder.

What You’ll Actually Do

• Lead the engineering organization across backend, frontend, infrastructure, QA, and security.
• Serve as the technical authority: coding, reviewing, and guiding architecture decisions across Rails services, React/TypeScript apps, Redis/MySQL clusters, and more.
• Define and execute the long-term technical roadmap, ensuring scalability, resilience, and sustainability.
• Oversee large-scale AWS infrastructure (~$2M/year spend), distributed job orchestration, and integrations with providers like S3 and Azure.
• Ensure operationalized security: patch vulnerabilities quickly, prevent incidents, and maintain audit-readiness.
• Drive rapid integration of acquisitions, merging products and tooling into a single stack and methodology.
• Maintain high engineering discipline: CI/CD pipelines, deep test coverage, observability, and automation-fi