VP of Engineering

Job description

ABOUT POSH We are all social creatures, but the dominant “social” companies today have evolved into digital loneliness machines, driving isolation, anxiety, and mental health challenges around the world. Human connection is lost. Posh is a beacon guiding us back. Posh enables anyone to build an IRL community based on shared interests, while connecting consumers with the communities of people just like them. Founded by event organizers who were frustrated with the growing loneliness epidemic and the tools available to build their own event brand, we’ve built the ultimate platform for launching, monetizing, and finding IRL communities of people just like you. In just 6 years, Posh has grown to a team of 70, expanded to 8M+ users, secured $70m in venture funding, and facilitated over $350M in transactions. ABOUT THE ROLE As VP of Engineering, you'll be the executive owner of engineering velocity, quality, and culture at Posh — accountable for the org that ships the React web platform that runs 10k organizer businesses a month, the React Native consumer app powering event discovery for 1m MAUs, and the AI and platform infrastructure that will define the next chapter of how IRL communities are built. You will manage a team of ~25 engineers that is quickly expanding: your mandate is to take it from here, establishing scalable yet nimble processes & org structure that turn Posh into a world-class engineering organization. Your day-to-day will involve: - Partnering closely with product to prioritize a cohesive roadmap that addresses both business objectives and deep technical requirements - Creating the engineering vision & storytelling how we’ll get there - Hiring, performance management, & elevating the talent bar - Mentoring & empowering leaders and ICs alike - Setting a tone of urgency, ambition, and craft that makes work both exciting and fulfilling This role reports directly to our CEO, operating as one of the the most visible and intense roles at the entire organization. This is an in-person position at our SoHo, NYC office. WHAT YOU'LL OWN & ACHIEVE - Be the executive voice of engineering: Own Engineering's narrative across All Hands, leadership reviews, board updates, and investor conversations. Translate technical strategy into business clarity for the entire team, and translate business priorities into focused engineering bets for your team. Be the leader our board and investors want to spend time with. The entire team should feel the engineering bar rise under your leadership. - Create the technical vision & turn it into strategy: Establish your thesis on how our engineering team & the infrastructure that powers our Web, Mobile, and AI products need to evolve in order to build a world-class product, then create and communicate the core principles, pod structure, and key inputs and outputs we need to get there. - Make Posh an AI-native engineering org: Define how Posh's engineers and non-technical ICs alike use AI to build — codifying agentic workflows, evaluating tooling, and reshaping team structure for an era where leverage per engineer is multiplying. Hold a clear, current point of view on where engineering team shape, hiring, and architecture are heading, and bring our org there as fast as possible. - Make career growth a competitive advantage: Redefine the engineering career ladder so the path to each level is undeniable. Ensure every tenured engineer has a personalized growth document. Every engineer should know what great looks like, what they own, and what their next step is. Set and uphold a high bar for what "great" looks like at every level. Have the hard conversations swiftly and with care. Make Posh the place senior engineers tell their friends about because their career compounded faster here than anywhere else. - Partner deeply with Product & Design: Make engineering an active force in shaping what we build, not just how. Build a partnership with Product & Design leadership that operates as one cohesive R&D function — where roadmap, scope, and craft are decided together. - Own engineering health as a measurable surface: Establish the signals — scoping accuracy, on-call load, bug frequency, uptime, time-to-merge, developer experience — that prove the engineering org is getting better, quarter over quarter, and share them transparently with the executive team and the broader company. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 12+ years of engineering experience with at least 3+ years leading engineers-of-engineers (i.e., managing managers) on high-growth consumer or marketplace software teams. Ideally, you have personally scaled an engineering org through the 25 → 75+ engineer band (Series A-C+) and know exactly what breaks at each stage. - You hold a deep understanding of platform architecture and infrastructure to balance our product-leaning team. You have a track record of being the technical leader people seek direction from — not because of title, but because you can sit in any RFC, system design, or production-incident conversation and add signal. You were a Staff or Principal level engineer before becoming a manager — you still write code, read PRs, and stay current because at heart you’re an engineer and a manager second. - Demonstrated success attracting and retaining top talent & building the leadership bench beneath you: you've personally hired multiple Staff/Principal engineers, EMs, and Directors who outperformed the bar you set, while developing deep relationships with skip levels that maximize your influence throughout the team’s you’ve been on. - A bias toward urgency and visible ambition. You set the pace of every room you're in. People who have worked with you describe you as obsessed with being great — not performatively, but unmistakably. - Exceptional communicator and operator. You can present at All Hands, write a board update, drive a roadmap review, and run a tough performance conversation in the same day, and do all four well. - Deep, current point of view on consumer mobile and web architecture, as well as the constantly evolving AI-native SDLC. You are a backend-leaning expert with direct experience building infrastructure that supports tens of millions of MAUs. React & React Native (Expo) at scale is strongly preferred. - Strong opinion — and recent direct experience — on how AI is reshaping engineering org structure, developer experience, and team leverage. You're not just adopting tools; you have a thesis. - Experience working closely with a founder/CEO who is highly involved in product, taste, and pace. NICE TO HAVE - Background at companies known for engineering craft and consumer obsession — Airbnb, Uber, DoorDash, Stripe, Linear, Ramp, Notion, Figma, or similar. - Experience inheriting existing engineering teams and managing through organizational change. - A point of view on engineering culture you've put into writing — talks, posts, internal manifestos that we can pressure-test against ours. - A deep network of other engineering leaders you’d be able to invite for talks and mentorship for new managers Posh provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training. Posh is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities in our job application procedures. Please let us know if you need assistance or accommodation due to a disability