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Salary: USD 220,000 - 260,000 / annual
Submittable is a mission-driven SaaS platform that empowers nonprofits, government entities, and mission-focused organizations to run programs, manage applications, and distribute funding. In 2024, the platform facilitated 30,000 programs, welcomed 1.2 million applicants, and distributed over $10 billion in funding.
You will serve as Vice President of Engineering, reporting to the CTO, and own engineering operations day-to-day: delivery, quality, reliability, cost, and the team. This is a hands-on leadership role designed for a different model than traditional SaaS scaling. Rather than growing output through headcount and management layers, Submittable believes AI coding tools enable small teams of strong engineers to ship what once required much larger teams. You will keep the organization lean, minimize management layers, and raise output per engineer.
This role requires you to remain deeply technical. Approximately one-fifth of your week will be spent on hands-on technical work: reading and writing code, reviewing pull requests, working incidents, and building tools for your teams. You must have shipped production software with AI agents in the last 12 months and understand firsthand where they succeed and fail.
Key responsibilities include: translating the CTO's technical strategy and product roadmap into plans and shipped software; staying hands-on with code review, prototyping, debugging, and tooling; making AI the default development practice across the team; measuring impact via DORA metrics and defect rates; keeping the organization lean by growing output faster than headcount; automating toil through AI and automation; raising technical standards for architecture, code review, testing, and incident response; owning platform reliability, security, and cloud cost on AWS and Azure with Kubernetes; building AI features into the product; hiring and developing a small, strong team; and partnering across Product, Design, Customer Experience, and Support.
Submittable values depth over span—this is leadership of a small, senior team with clear ownership, not a large organization managed through layers.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Must have shipped production software with AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, etc.) within the past 12 months. This is a requirement, not a preference.
- 15+ years in software engineering with deep expertise in distributed systems, API design, data modeling, cloud infrastructure (AWS and Azure, Kubernetes), and DevOps.
- 7+ years in engineering leadership, including at least 3 years leading other managers.
- Demonstrated track record of raising team output without matching headcount growth; ability to provide metrics (delivery, team size, cost before and after).
- Experience building and running multi-tenant, cloud-based B2B SaaS products at scale.
- Record of shipping complex software on predictable timelines without sacrificing quality, security, or reliability.
- Experience leading distributed teams across multiple countries and time zones.
- Strong written communication skills.
- Comfort with rapid change in software development practices; ability to form views, test them, and adapt based on evidence.
- Ability to explain technical trade-offs to executives and non-technical stakeholders in plain language.
- Track record of hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineers; experience building inclusive teams.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Nice to have: experience in private equity-backed or high-growth SaaS; familiarity with SOC 2 and GDPR; experience shipping LLM-based features to customers and evaluating them for accuracy and fairness.
- Must be a U.S. resident and eligible to work in the U.S. full-time. Cannot accommodate scholastic or employment visas. Not eligible if residing in: Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Louisiana, Maine, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia, or Wyoming.
