VP of Software Engineering - Platform
Who We Are
At Firstup , our mission is to improve the employee experience at every moment that matters, large and small. As the communication pipeline for the world's workforce, we now serve 40 of the Fortune 100 companies, reaching and connecting more than 17 million employees daily.
Our employees are experts in the employee experience, workforce communications and technology.
Joining Firstup means joining a movement to make work better for every worker. As the world’s first intelligent communication platform, Firstup meaningfully engages employees at every moment from hire to retire, and delivers engagement insights to help companies support, promote and retain their talent. Our movement has taken root and is evident in our world-class customer base. Now we need your help. Ready to make a difference in the world?
We are seeking a VP of Software Engineering, Platform to lead one of the company’s most strategic engineering functions: the platforms that enable our product teams to build faster, integrate more deeply, operate more reliably, and deliver AI-native enterprise software at scale.
This leader will own the strategy and execution for our application development platform, agentic AI platform, integration platform, data platform, reporting and analytics capabilities, and AI-native software development lifecycle.
The ideal candidate is a hands-on technical executive who can set long-term strategy, lead multiple teams, develop senior technical talent, and engage deeply in architecture across cloud-native systems, AI platforms, data infrastructure, and enterprise integrations.
What You'll Do
Define and Execute Platform Strategy
● Lead the platform engineering vision, roadmap, operating model, and execution plan.
● Build a cohesive organization across shared services, AI platform, integrations, data engineering, reporting, analytics, and developer experience.
● Translate business and product strategy into platform capabilities that improve speed, reliability, security, scalability, and customer value.
● Establish ownership models, platform adoption strategies, service maturity standards, and measurable outcomes
Build Enterprise-Grade Application Platforms
● Own foundational services including API Gateway, Developer Portal, Authentication, Authorization, Logging, Audit Trail, service templates, and platform libraries.
● Drive a paved-road development model that improves velocity while preserving appropriate team autonomy.
● Ensure shared services are reliable, observable, secure, well-documented, and easy to adopt.
● Provide technical leadership across AWS, Kubernetes, Ruby on Rails, Node, Python, PostgreSQL, and related cloud-native technologies.
Lead the Agentic AI Platform
● Own the strategy, architecture, and execution for the company’s agentic AI platform.
● Build reusable capabilities for tool definition, retrieval and grounding, model interaction, permission context, tracing, evaluation, versioning, and usage reporting.
● Enable teams to develop AI-powered features safely and quickly using OpenAI SDK, MCP, Python, Node, and related technologies.
● Establish patterns for permission-aware agents, grounded responses, tool execution, model orchestration, evaluations, and production observability.
Transform Software Development with AI
● Lead the company’s AI-native software development lifecycle strategy.
● Standardize agent skills, plug-ins, local development environments, templates, and workflows.
● Enable AI-assisted development across coding, testing, code review, documentation, release management, support, and operations.
● Define guardrails for security, code quality, data privacy, intellectual property, and responsible AI usage.
Own Enterprise Integrations
● Define the technical strategy for enterprise integrations and ecosystem connectivity.
● Lead integration capabilities using APIs, MCP, agents, and scalable integration patterns.
● Own integrations with