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Honeycomb is a Series D-funded observability platform serving companies like HelloFresh, Slack, LaunchDarkly, and Vanguard. Named to Forbes' America's Best Startups in 2022 and 2023, the company has scaled past 200 employees and is at an inflection point as AI reshapes how software is built, shipped, and run. Honeycomb created the observability category and is now leading its reinvention in the AI era.
As VP of Engineering, you'll join the executive team as a full strategic partner. The role combines three core responsibilities:
**Strategy & Direction**: Form your own view of where product, technology, and market are heading. Bring this perspective to your closest partners (Product and CEO) and the wider executive team. You'll help sharpen existing bets and identify new ones, working in an environment where strategy is revised frequently as the world changes.
**Executive Leadership**: Strengthen the executive team through close collaboration with Product and the CEO. You'll challenge and be challenged in return, building true commitment to a shared direction. The exec team functions as a first team, and you'll make it better while benefiting from that partnership.
**Organizational Leadership**: Lead a high-performing engineering organization through rapid change. You'll manage strong managers, directors, and individual contributors, directing their talent toward the biggest opportunities. This includes adjusting org structure, goals, and ways of working to increase effectiveness while preserving what makes the team great. You'll communicate engineering's direction clearly and repeatedly—to engineers, managers, the exec team, and the company—helping people understand what is changing and why. In a remote-first environment, much communication happens in writing and presentations.
**Technical Credibility**: Lead from deep technical understanding. You cannot lead an AI-era shift without understanding the ergonomics of the rapid change underway. You'll maintain the technical credibility necessary to guide engineering decisions in this transformative period.
Honeycomb is fully distributed, believing that delivery matters more than location. The company invests in people, emphasizing trust, autonomy, and accountability from day one.
**Requirements**:
- Led engineering through large-scale changes in direction, not just growth
- Shipped software with AI tools yourself within the last 12 months
- Special talent for collaboration and improving executive teams
- Interested in shaping strategy as much as executing it
- Experience at larger companies, understanding what breaks as companies scale, combined with early-stage startup risk tolerance
- Comfortable with uncertainty, rapid change, and shaping new bets toward product-market fit
- Led distributed teams with strong written and in-person communication skills
- Care about developer tools and have good taste in them (prior Honeycomb use is a bonus, not required)
- Alignment with company values around inclusion, responsible business practices, and engineering discipline
