VP of Engineering, Applications

About the Company

A1 is on a mission to build a proactive smart assistant for everyday users, bringing intelligence to conversations, errands, organizing, and workflows. The product focuses on high reliability for long-running workflows, persistent context, and real-world task completion using AI-native applications.

Responsibilities

• Own the application engineering strategy and execution across backend, mobile, and desktop platforms.
• Lead and grow a small, senior applications team of engineers.
• Set the architectural direction for AI-powered product workflows, APIs, and client integrations.
• Partner with Machine Learning leadership to translate model capability into shippable product features.
• Make high-impact decisions regarding latency, cost, reliability, security, and user experience.
• Ensure production readiness through observability, monitoring, retries, fallbacks, privacy, and cost controls.
• Balance rapid shipping speed with long-term system quality and discipline.

Requirements

• Significant experience leading application or product engineering for complex systems.
• Strong hands-on background building and shipping production backend systems.
• Experience delivering AI-powered products and understanding model integration trade-offs.
• Excellent system design skills across services, APIs, clients, and data flows.
• Ability to operate across multiple platforms including backend, mobile, and desktop.
• Proven ability to make high-impact technical decisions under ambiguity.
• Strong bias toward shipping, iteration, and learning from real-world usage.