VP of Platform Engineering - Agentic AI (San Francisco) (San Francisco, CA)

VP of Platform Engineering

About this role

We are looking for a VP of Platform Engineering with 10+ years of experience to own and scale the AI-native platform core at a profitable, Series A agentic AI company serving hundreds of financial institutions. This is a player-coach role — you'll build and lead the platform engineering org while staying hands-on in the code, partnering directly with the CTO and CEO on architecture, product releases, and new initiatives.

What will you be doing?

• Managing and growing the existing platform engineering team (~4 engineers today, expanding) while remaining deeply hands-on in code and architecture
• Working directly with the CEO and CTO daily on product releases and new platform initiatives being built from scratch
• Owning the AI-native platform core end-to-end — agent runtime, LLM orchestration, retrieval systems, evals, integrations, and the agent-authoring platform
• Driving velocity, quality, and reliability across all platform domains including tooling, eval gates, and observability
• Scaling the platform org and its engineering culture through the company's next stage of growth

Key Requirements

• 10+ years of engineering experience with 4–6 years in leadership; must have scaling experience (revenue, funding stages, team growth)
• Production-scale experience in AI/agentic systems, LLM/ML infrastructure, or conversational/voice AI — working on the platform side
• Hands-on and still technical — must be actively coding, reviewing PRs, and making architecture calls (not a pure people manager)
• Startup experience strongly preferred (Series A–D); open to strong VP-level candidates from big tech if they show exceptional career trajectory
• Must be on-site in San Francisco 5 days/week; BS/BA in Computer Science required
• 10 - 16 years of experience as a platform engineer

Tech stack

• TypeScript, Python, LLMs, Agentic AI, Distributed Systems, Cloud Architecture, ML Infrastructure, LLM Orchestration, Retrieval Systems, API Design

About the company

Our client is an AI-native fintech building agentic AI for community banks and credit unions across the US. One AI platform delivers a unified experience across voice, digital and employee-assisted channels, powered by a single AI brain that continuously learns and operates autonomously.