VP of Engineering

The role

Engineering at Clipster has grown past what one role can carry. Our Head of Engineering has owned delivery cadence, org design, security, the fraud initiative, infrastructure, and incident escalation alongside the architecture and code quality bar — and that combination doesn't scale further. You'll take exec-level accountability for that first list — org structure, delivery planning, security, the fraud initiative, infrastructure, incident escalation — while our Head of Engineering stays focused on architecture, code quality, and the engineering hiring bar. You'll report directly to our CEO and represent engineering to the rest of the leadership team.

What you'll do

• Design team composition and pod structure as engineering scales.
• Carry accountability for security outcomes across the team.
• Take accountability for infrastructure and data decisions across the stack.
• Represent engineering to the other department heads and run cross-department intake and prioritization.
• Propose headcount plans and role sequencing for CEO approval.
• Own incident escalation from first alert to resolution.
• Weigh in on product prioritization alongside our product leads.

What we're looking for

• 6+ years in engineering leadership roles, including time as a CTO, VP Engineering, or Head of Engineering at a product company.
• Hands-on software engineering experience earlier in your career — this is not a PM, Scrum Master, or delivery-manager path into engineering leadership.
• Backend-heavy or fullstack-with-backend foundation: platforms, infrastructure, distributed systems, APIs, databases, cloud. Pure frontend backgrounds won’t fit.
• A track record of actually building and scaling an engineering org — hiring, forming pods, installing process — at a startup or scaleup, not inheriting one already built.
• Comfortable representing engineering to a CEO and to non-engineering department heads, and owning cross-department intake and prioritization.
• Bonus: background in marketplace, SaaS, creator, adtech, or payments, exposure to trust & safety or fraud work, or security compliance experience (SOC 2, pen-testing).