Vice President of Engineering

Company Overview At Fluency, we come together under two shared passions that drive our culture: the scaling of digital ad operations, and fostering a workplace environment rooted in open communication, inclusivity, and a growth-oriented mindset. These passions not only set us apart in the industry, but also fuel our collective drive to reshape the industry and reinvent ourselves along the way. We're not just revolutionizing the digital advertising horizon, we're shaping an organization where every member feels a sense of pride and is inspired to do their best work. Job Summary The VP of Engineering is a strategic executive leader responsible for the long-term technical vision, organizational health, and scalable architecture of the Fluency platform. This role moves beyond day-to-day tactical ownership to focus on building high-leverage organizational structures, cross-functional alignment at the executive level, and a platform foundation that supports massive customer growth without proportional increases in technical debt. Crucially, this leader brings a proven track record of designing and executing large-scale system implementations within the high-volume advertising technology (Ad-Tech) or digital advertising ecosystem to fuel our next phase of scale. Key Executive Responsibilities Executive Strategy & Influence: Partner with the CTO and C-Suite to define the long-term engineering roadmap and ensure continuous alignment with overarching company strategy and platform stability requirements. Organizational Architecture: Continuously refine and oversee the engineering organizational structure (e.g., Squad model) to ensure directors and leads are empowered to operate independently, preventing the VP from becoming a tactical constraint. Platform Resilience & Ad-Tech Scale: Maintain and evolve the strategic architectural direction of the Fluency platform—particularly blending our cellular/isolated database architecture with the high-concurrency, low-latency requirements characteristic of large-scale advertising systems. Ensure robust resilience under massive data volumes for hundreds of enterprise customers. Experimentation Framework: Define and enforce engineering standards and clear operational boundaries between experimental product R&D (Labs) and stable core engineering to safeguard platform integrity. Remote Leadership Excellence: Lead and foster a high-performance, geographically distributed remote engineering culture, ensuring seamless communication, accountability, and operational excellence across all time zones. Talent Strategy: Develop and manage the long-term talent strategy, overseeing hiring, professional development pipelines, and succession planning to ensure staffing aligns with future technical and business needs. What We Look For Strategic Visionary: A leader who can articulate the business impact of technical debt and infrastructure investments to non-technical stakeholders. Systems Thinker: Proven ability to build "systems of people" that solve complex problems without needing direct executive intervention. Ad-Tech Scale Expertise: Deep operational understanding of high-throughput distributed systems, heavy data pipeline mechanics, and ecosystem integrations unique to the advertising world. Crisis Management Executive: Ability to remain calm and decisive during high-stakes incidents while simultaneously building the frameworks to prevent their recurrence. Executive Presence: Comfortable navigating organizational resistance and building compelling business cases for modernization. Required Experience 10+ years of progressive experience in engineering leadership. 5+ years of engineering leadership experience specifically within the advertising industry (Ad-Tech, Mar-Tech, or high-volume digital media platforms), successfully delivering large-scale system implementations. Proven track record of scaling a SaaS platform through significant revenue and customer growth. Experience managing multiple managers or dir…