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Salary: USD 240,000 - 280,000 / annual
Total Expert is a Customer Operating System for financial services, enabling banks, credit unions, and mortgage lenders to turn data into relationships. Since 2016, the platform has facilitated over $7 trillion in funded loan volume. The company is expanding from mortgage into banking, wealth, and insurance verticals.
Role Overview
You will lead the Applications Engineering organization as VP, Engineering, reporting to the SVP, Engineering and serving as their #2. You'll oversee three engineering managers and approximately half of the engineering organization across six product areas: Journeys and Campaigns, SMS and Communications, CRM and Lead Management, Content, Contact Service, and Mobile. Your primary responsibility is developing leaders, setting clear expectations, and coaching teams to solve real customer problems.
Key Responsibilities
- Develop and coach three engineering managers and technical leaders, identifying strengths and growth areas, and building succession pipelines for key roles
- Own delivery and quality across six product areas, translating technical strategy into executable plans and team commitments
- Lead four major programs: orchestration engine (replacing seven legacy marketing automation systems), Contact Service migration off the monolith, SMS reliability improvements, and multi-vertical readiness for banking/wealth/insurance expansion
- Set clear goals and hold teams accountable through visible commitments and peer accountability rather than oversight and approval chains
- Shape technical strategy and architecture decisions in partnership with the SVP, bringing strong technical opinions while respecting final decision authority
- Raise the talent bar by partnering with People and Talent Acquisition on hiring, interview calibration, and onboarding processes
- Build one cohesive team across US and India locations with consistent standards, context access, and growth paths
- Implement blameless incident reviews and learning practices to prevent repeat failures, especially for customer-facing communications products
- Lead change management through resistance, particularly for the large-scale legacy system replacement initiative
- Drive AI adoption across your organization, helping engineers transition toward higher-judgment work as AI tools handle mechanical tasks
- Get engineers closer to customers and Product, organizing around customer problems and maintaining tight feedback loops
- Partner effectively with the SVP to own execution and people management while they focus on technology and strategy
Success Metrics
- 90 days: Know every manager and their teams; understand real work, incidents, and customer escalations; align with SVP on work split; document org strengths, gaps, and top risks
- 6 months: Blameless reviews and dissent practices operational; SMS reliability guardrails live; interview process updated and calibrated; managers can articulate each report's strengths and development areas; major programs have trusted plans tracking to schedule
- 12 months: Reduced regretted attrition; strong ramp for new hires; at least two promotions into larger scope; major programs hitting committed milestones; customer-facing incidents down; measurable AI adoption; SVP focused on strategy, not day-to-day delivery
Culture and Values
The company operates on three core engineering principles: (1) Reality is the referee—decisions settle on customer outcomes and evidence, not title or opinion; (2) Disagreement is a duty—raising concerns is expected and safe; (3) Fix the system, not the person—when something breaks, address root causes. The role requires customer obsession, grit and resilience, speed, and excellence.
Requirements
- Typically 15+ years building and operating enterprise SaaS, including 5+ years leading engineering organizations through managers
- Ideally experience in B2B SaaS, fintech, or other complex, regulated enterprise settings
- Proven track record building strong engineering teams, including distributed and global teams; demonstrated ability to set high hiring bars and develop engineers and managers into larger roles
- Record of holding teams to commitments while maintaining trust, including turning around teams after missed deliveries or production incidents
- Strong technical background with hands-on experience in customer-facing applications, event-driven and distributed systems at scale, and legacy modernization
- Experience with marketing automation, communications (email and SMS), or CRM platforms in multi-tenant environments is a strong plus
- Technical credibility with engineers; comfort in design reviews, incident reviews, and roadmap conversations
- Experience leading large, multi-team programs from design through production delivery
- Demonstrated ability to lead change through resistance and win over skeptical senior engineers
- History of partnering with strong technical leaders, shaping strategy, executing well, and making them more effective
- Personal use of AI tools in engineering work and a point of view on how AI changes engineering teams, roles, and quality practices; ideally experience driving adoption across teams
- Must be authorized to work in the US; company unable to sponsor or take over visa sponsorship
