VP of Engineering at Nace AI (Palo Alto, CA)VP of Engineering

VP of Engineering Palo Alto, CA · Full-time · On-site

About Us: At Nace AI, we are redefining how professional services operate by delivering Sovereign Specialized Intelligence. As an applied research and product company, we equip enterprises with a comprehensive AI stack to build customized, secure intelligence tailored to their unique business needs. Driven by advanced Small Language Models and our dynamic metamodel framework, our flagship platforms - Nace Data Intelligence and the Nace SLM Cloud - enable true end-to-end business process automation. The result is transformative ROI: professional services firms using Nace AI are currently recovering 1,000 hours per client engagement, drastically reducing overhead and accelerating delivery. The work we are doing has a meaningful impact across industries, and every hire at Nace AI plays a critical role in shaping the company’s trajectory. This is a unique opportunity to join a high conviction AI company at an early stage and directly influence its growth.

If building a world-class AI team from the ground up excites you, we’d love to talk.

We are hiring a VP of Engineering to lead and scale our engineering organization. This is one of the most senior roles at Nace AI. You will partner directly with our CEO and CTO to translate our research and product vision into reliable, enterprise-grade systems — and build the team, processes, and culture that make world-class execution repeatable. In this role, you will own engineering delivery end to end: planning, execution, quality, and velocity across a distributed team of researchers and engineers. You will be equally comfortable setting technical direction in an architecture review and unblocking a critical customer deployment.

• Lead, grow, and retain a high-caliber engineering organization spanning ML, platform, and product engineering
• Own delivery: set roadmaps with product and research leadership, drive execution, and hold a high bar for quality and speed
• Partner with the CTO on system architecture, technical strategy, and build-vs-buy decisions
• Establish engineering processes that scale — planning cycles, code review standards, incident response, and on-call practices
• Ensure our systems meet the reliability, security, and compliance expectations of enterprise financial customers (SOC 2, data governance, auditability)
• Recruit senior engineering talent and design the org structure for our next stage of growth
• Represent engineering with customers, partners, and investors as needed
• Manage effectively across a globally distributed team and time zones

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years leading engineering teams at high-growth startups or enterprise software companies
• Proven track record scaling an engineering org from ~10 to 50+ engineers while maintaining velocity and quality
• Deep technical fluency in modern ML/AI systems, distributed infrastructure, and enterprise SaaS — you can go toe-to-toe with senior ICs on architecture
• Experience shipping and operating products for enterprise customers with strict security and compliance requirements; fintech, audit, or regulated-industry background is a strong plus
• Professional proficiency in both English and Russian, enabling effective collaboration across our distributed, multilingual engineering team
• Strong operational instincts: you build lightweight processes that create leverage, not bureaucracy
• Exceptional judgment on hiring — you have built teams people want to join and stay on
• Based in or willing to relocate to the Bay Area; this role is on-site in Palo Alto

• Experience with LLM-based products, agentic systems, or applied research environments
• Prior experience as a founder, founding engineer, or first VP of Engineering
• Familiarity with financial audit, accounting, or compliance domains

You will join at a pivotal stage: strong backing, real enterprise customers, and a research team pushing the frontier of specialized enterprise intelligence. As our most senior engineering leader, you will shape not just what we build, but how we build — and who we build it with.