VP of Engineering

VP of Engineering

Full-Time | Engineering | Atlanta, GA or Remote (If Remote, up to 50% Travel to Atlanta)

About the Role

Swordpoint is looking for a VP of Engineering to own how our team is built and how it ships. Our engineering team is roughly ten people today, split across the United States and Brazil, and we intend to grow it substantially over the next year. You will own delivery across our products: timelines, scope, who is accountable for what, and the honest conversation when something is going to slip. The CTO decides where we are going. You are the person who makes sure we get there.

Building the team is a large part of this role. You will run hiring end to end, from sourcing through a calibrated interview loop, and you will set leveling, onboarding, and how performance is measured. That also means forming a real view of the engineers we already have and telling us what you see. We want someone who can evaluate talent accurately, develop the people who are strong, and be direct about where we have gaps. Depending on how the team grows, you may hire and lead an Engineering Manager, or run the team directly for a while.

This is a hands-on role. You will be in architecture reviews, in the hiring loop, and close enough to the code to disagree credibly with a strong engineer. Part of the job is modernization: some of our software is load-bearing and needs to be brought forward, and you will break that work into shippable increments and protect the people doing it from being pulled onto the next urgent thing. We also expect you to be genuinely fluent in AI, both in what we ship to customers and in how our own team works day to day.

Key Responsibilities

• Own engineering delivery across our products: commitments, dates, scope tradeoffs, and clear communication when priorities change

• Build the team: sourcing, interview loop design, leveling, onboarding, and a performance and career framework that holds up as we grow

• Evaluate the engineers we have and the engineers we are considering, and own the hiring bar

• Manage and develop engineers across the United States and Brazil, and build an operating model that works across time zones

• Set engineering process that scales without becoming bureaucracy: code review standards, CI/CD, testing strategy, on-call, incident response, and release management

• Run the modernization of existing systems as a sequenced program, broken into increments the business can absorb

• Drive AI-assisted development as a standard practice on the team, including tooling, norms, and how we measure whether it is working

• Partner with product, enterprise sales, and operations to arbitrate competing claims on engineering time

• Report on engineering health, delivery, and capacity to the CTO and the leadership team

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a closely related technical field, or equivalent professional experience

• 8+ years in software engineering, including at least 3 years managing engineers

• Experience growing an engineering team through a meaningful step change in size, with the ability to describe what broke along the way and what you did about it

• Demonstrated ability to identify and evaluate engineering talent, and a track record of hiring people who are still there two years later

• Experience owning delivery for multiple products or workstreams at once, with competing priorities and different customers

• The ability to evaluate existing code and decide what needs to be modernized and how, and experience running that kind of work while the team continued to ship

• Strong technical depth across the stack: you can lead an architecture review, evaluate a design doc, and read the code when you need to

• Genuine enthusiasm for AI, including hands-on experience shipping AI-powered features with a team and using modern AI development tooling in your own work

• Comfort navigating ambiguity and shifting priorities in a fast-paced, scaling environment

Preferred Qualifications

• Engineering leadership at a top-tier technical organization such as Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, or Stripe, or at a leading AI-native company

• Experience managing distributed or nearshore engineering teams, particularly in Latin America

• Experience at a company small enough that you had to build the process yourself rather than inherit it

• A full-stack or platform engineering background before you moved into management

• Familiarity with home services, retail, field service, warranty, logistics, maritime, or insurance industries