VP of Engineering

Job description

# **VP of Engineering** ## **Mission** LENS’s mission is to end traffic accidents. LENS prevents accidents and saves lives by detecting hazards to prevent accidents before they happen. ## **Platform & Product** LENS Detect scans CCTV feeds on highways to identify hazards, in real-time, before they become accidents. Public Safety agencies, alongside Departments of Transportation, receive alerts on the LENS Detect dashboard about Disabled Vehicles, Stalled Big Rigs, and Pedestrians on Freeway. A dispatcher reviews and validates the detection, and then dispatches an officer to the scene to assist the person in need — resulting in either preventing an accident or saving a life. CBS LA recently did a three minute TV feature that succinctly captures what LENS is doing with Public Safety Agencies in one of the largest traffic capitals in the world: [CHP LA Communications Center using AI to prevent accidents before they happen](http://youtube.com/watch?v=KrY2NVJ2eno) ## **Role & Responsibilities** As the VP of Engineering, you seek transformational change. You do not accept the status quo that accidents are an accepted inevitability, or that *they just happen*. Instead, you believe when the root cause of an accident can be known in advance, the accident can and should be prevented. You work with fellow Preventers that share this core belief, using LENS to prevent accidents and save lives. Your responsibilities are: - **Working closely with our Co-Founder and CTO** to architect, build, operate, and scale the LENS Platform, applications, and data services. - **Recruiting, hiring, and leading & motivating an engineering organization** that will likely double five times in the next 12 months. Designing engineering organizations that accelerate with compounding impact as they scale, rather than slow with bureaucracy. - **Establishing engineering craftsmanship as a cultural standard**. Developed through the LENS Programming Guide, alongside the LENS Interface Guidelines which set standardized frameworks used by both engineers and supervised agents. - **Architecting for scale from the start with design-thinking within every part of the system** to solve difficult architectural decisions that simplify everything built forward. - **Building what is pure, simple, and clean** while maintaining completeness. - **Measuring** daily, monthly, and annual impact through pre-accident **detections**, **accidents averted**, and **lives saved**. ## **Mindset, Principles, and Skills & Experience** Your **mindset** is grounded in: - **Adaptability drives evolution.** You believe constant change, with underlying principles, is how organizations learn the fastest and shape the future. - **Tools are society’s greatest levers.** We make tools that are force multipliers for our capabilities to help others. - **Simultaneously setting foundation, while remaining curious and open.** The ability to balance both at the same time is what enables innovation and scale, not just one. **Principles** you share with us are: - **Perfect product.** Perfecting product now in design, development, and release is what enables those using LENS to make the most impact. - **Invest the most time where it makes the most progress**. We evaluate every potential action and priority by the 80/20 rule, asking if it will make an 80 or 20% impact on the objective? - **Begin with the end in mind**. We identify the future we want to create, and work backwards to identify the sequence of frameworks, components, and pieces that need to assemble to turn that idea into a reality. We do this in an unusual level of detail, while still moving swiftly, in order that every major system is intentionally designed before it is built. The **Skills & Experience** you have are: - **Building foundational frameworks and services**. - **Complete hands-on capabilities working cross-functionality** to design, build, and evolve software and services for event-driven components using Python, Go, TypeScript, Rust, LangGraph, Kafka, gRPC, and Kubernetes. Assemble components to form an observable, low-latency Vision & Perception pipeline using OpenTelemetry GenAI, PyTorch, OpenCV, TensorRT, Prometheus, and Grafana. - **Directly leading the recruiting, hiring, and scaling up** of a highly creative, collaborative, and rapidly-executing engineering organization. - **Being a senior management member**, working alongside other senior operators to advance a meaningful mission-driven cause (if you have not found this yet, and now found it with us that is also great!). - **Delivering highly reliable (five nines) software** that meets the demands of real-time agencies in Public Safety, as well as long-term organizations in Transportation — using software, services, and data in service of reducing harm and improving lives. The time to accept traffic accidents is ending, and the time to prevent them has begun. This belief is becoming more of an inevitable reality every day. The number of people public agencies and departments are helping with LENS keeps growing faster and faster. If you want to set large new foundational blocks for public safety, design the teams and frameworks that redefine global maxima, and create a rare force multiplier to enable preventing harm, this role is for you. LENS is an equal opportunity employer committed to building an inclusive workplace. We do not discriminate against any applicant or employee on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, age, national origin, protected veteran status, disability, marital status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.