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Pelico is a manufacturing orchestration platform that uses AI to connect fragmented supply chain, production, and quality data for industrial operations. Founded in 2019 and backed by General Catalyst, 83North, and Serena, the company has raised $72M with 300% YoY revenue growth, deployed across 15+ countries, and trusted by companies like Airbus, Boeing, Safran, Eaton, and Cartier. Headquarters in Paris with offices in Miami, London, and Amsterdam.
This is a founding VP of Engineering role for a new product line—a rare opportunity to lead a core strategic initiative with full ownership. You will set technical direction, make critical decisions, and build the engineering team from the ground up.
Key Responsibilities:
- Design and ship the platform that manufacturers use to author, run, observe, and govern AI agents, including the canvas, tool catalogue, model selection, and full operational loop.
- Transform the deterministic simulation engine to enable agents to read production plans, take actions, observe consequences across millions of connected steps, and be scored on factory-wide impact.
- Solve the multi-agent coordination problem: measure each agent's true contribution, prevent agents from undoing each other's work, and establish a defensible moat in unsolved territory.
- Build enterprise trust by ensuring every agent action is reproducible, auditable, and explainable to aerospace and defense IT standards, with humans in the loop where required.
- Drive product-market fit by distinguishing vision from reality, deciding platform vs. product scope, and translating technical capabilities into winning commercial narratives for enterprise deals.
- Set engineering standards, write production code, work with AI coding agents at scale, and hire and develop senior engineers.
You will leverage existing company assets including data, event dependency graphs, simulation engines, and next-best-action algorithms, plus direct access to customer relationships with leading manufacturers.
Requirements:
- Proven track record building and operating production multi-agent systems: orchestration runtimes, tool and MCP surfaces, agent harnesses, guardrails, model selection.
- Experience taking an early product from first design-partner customer to real revenue in a demanding or regulated industry (aerospace, defense, finance, healthcare), owning both trust standards and the path from demo to signed deal.
- Top-tier AI fluency demonstrated through shipped AI-agent products with rigorous eval and observability discipline (regression and drift detection, cost and latency budgets); daily work with AI coding agent fleets; sound judgment on what to automate vs. keep human.
- Daily hands-on production code writing and review; ability to lead senior engineers by being among the best technical contributors in the room.
- Platform builder's instinct: ability to turn internal engines into clean, usable surfaces for other teams.
Nice to Have:
- Supply chain, discrete manufacturing, or operations experience (planning, parts shortages, inventory).
- Optimization or operations-research literacy to collaborate with OR teams.
- Aerospace, defense, or other regulated-industry experience (e.g., ITAR).
