Alexandria, VA
Who Staffing is looking for a Vice President of Engineering for a full-time, direct hire opportunity with our client in Alexandria, VA.
Job Summary:
Our client is a media intelligence company operating at the intersection of advertising, data, technology, and a rapidly changing media landscape.
They got their start in political advertising, where they have built a particularly deep expertise, and today they are expanding aggressively across the broader advertising industry. They maintain a proprietary catalog of advertising creative, enrich it with extensive metadata, and combine it with large-scale Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) data and other sources to provide actionable media intelligence to advertisers, agencies, media buyers, and other customers.
This is an unusually dynamic time to be working in their industry. Linear television continues to give way to connected television and streaming. Advertising channels and buying practices are changing. Search, discovery, and consumer behavior are being reshaped by AI. At the same time, advances in large language models, agents, and machine-to-machine integration are changing what is possible in both software and information products.
Our client is entering its next stage of growth, and they are hiring a Vice President of Engineering to help them build the engineering organization and technical capabilities they will need for that future.
The Role:
The VP of Engineering will report to the CTO and assume primary responsibility for the day-today leadership and operation of our client's engineering function.
This is not a role for someone who wants to arrive with a large-company playbook and impose it wholesale. Nor is it primarily an administrative management position. They are looking for a hands-on technical leader who can understand their systems deeply, earn the confidence of a small and experienced team, improve the way they build and operate software, and help them evolve without losing the qualities that have made them successful.
The role has three equally important dimensions:
Technical depth. You should be capable of getting close to difficult systems, data, and code; evaluating complex technical work; troubleshooting when necessary; and making sound architectural and engineering decisions.
Operational leadership. You will take ownership of engineering execution: priorities, delivery, technical operations, engineering practices, and the day-to-day management of the engineering team. You will help make our clients’ systems and their engineering organization more reliable, scalable, and less dependent on any single person.
Cultural stewardship. Our client is a thoughtful, collaborative, low-ego company. They value capable people who trust one another and enjoy working together. Your job is to strengthen that culture as they grow—not replace it with bureaucracy, politics, or unnecessary process.
A major measure of success will be creating an engineering organization that can operate effectively and independently while allowing their CTO to spend substantially more time on longer-horizon technology strategy, AI, experimentation, industry evolution, and new product capabilities.
What You’ll Own
You will directly lead their internal engineering team and take responsibility for the team's execution, development, and performance. You will work closely with the CTO while increasingly becoming the person who ensures that engineering commitments actually become reliable production systems.
Your responsibilities will include:
· Lead, coach, and develop their engineering team, including regular management, prioritization, task tracking, feedback, and removal of blockers.
· Own day-to-day engineering execution and delivery, including sprint-level planning and follow-through.
· Establish appropriate engineering standards without introducing process for process's sake.
· Raise their level of sophistication in automated testing, CI/CD, deployment practices, code review, observability, documentation, and production reliability.
· Improve security practices, including secrets and credential management, repository hygiene, access controls, and secure development practices.
· Review and evaluate complex code, data-processing logic, architectural changes, and production deployments.
· Reduce key-person dependencies by documenting systems, distributing knowledge, and building repeatable operational practices.
· Lead or oversee complex production operations such as large-scale data migrations, data restatements, system upgrades, and other high-consequence changes.
· Help modernize and maintain their Linux/Unix infrastructure in partnership with their infrastructure vendors.
· Work with external development and infrastructure partners while maintaining strong internal technical ownership.
· Partner with Product, Sales, and company leadership to translate customer and market needs into capabilities they can build and sell.
· Help determine where they should adopt new technologies—and, equally importantly, where an existing, simpler technology remains the better engineering choice.
· Participate in hiring and help shape the engineering organization as clients grow.
The Technical Environment
Data is at the center of technology.
They ingest large volumes of advertising and media data from multiple sources, including ACR partners, and operate pipelines that transform those raw observations into the datasets underlying our products. Their work includes integrating multiple detection sources, extrapolating panel observations to real-world audiences and geographies, enriching advertising data with additional public and commercial datasets, and serving the resulting information to both expert and nontechnical users.
Their internal engineering team is particularly focused on the data pipelines and systems that perform this transformation.
Snowflake is foundational to their architecture. They operate datasets measured in the trillions of rows and work directly with large-scale transformations, analytical workloads, data quality, performance, and reliability.
They are primarily an AWS environment, using AWS databases, Lambda, and related services. Their broader technology landscape includes substantial amounts of Python, SQL, Java, shell scripting, Linux/Unix systems, and other technologies selected according to the problem at hand.
They deliberately take a pragmatic approach to technology. They are interested in modern approaches, but they do not adopt technology merely because it is fashionable. Sometimes a cloud-native or serverless architecture is the right answer. Sometimes a conventional application or Unix process is. They expect Their engineering leaders to understand enough about the layers underneath their tools to know the difference.
That makes this a particularly good environment for someone who likes technology: there are difficult problems, enormous datasets, mature systems worth preserving, systems worth modernizing, and considerable freedom to help determine how we approach the next generation.
AI and the Future of Engineering
AI is not a side project for this role.
They expect artificial intelligence to change both how their engineering organization works and what their products ultimately become.
The VP of Engineering should be an active and capable user of modern AI development tools, including coding agents. You should understand the rapidly evolving ecosystem around LLMs, agents, APIs, tool use, and protocols such as MCP well enough to make informed engineering decisions rather than simply follow industry enthusiasm.
You don't need to be an AI researcher, but you should understand how modern LLM-based systems work, where they are powerful, where they are unreliable, and how to evaluate the tradeoffs involved in putting them into real production workflows.
They want someone who will help their engineers become dramatically more capable through these technologies while working closely with our client’s CTO on the larger implications of AI for their products and industry.
What They're Looking For
The strongest candidate will combine substantial hands-on engineering experience with successful leadership of software and data engineering teams.
They expect you to bring many of the following:
· Significant experience leading engineering teams while remaining technically credible and engaged.
· A strong background in software engineering and production systems.
· Deep familiarity with modern software development practices, including automated testing,
· CI/CD, source control, deployment, monitoring, and operational reliability.
· Strong SQL and data engineering instincts, including experience with large, complex production datasets.
· Experience with cloud infrastructure, particularly AWS.
· Meaningful hands-on Linux/Unix system administration experience. They value engineers who understand what is happening beneath the abstractions they use.
· Experience evaluating production code and architecture and helping other engineers improve their work.
· Experience with Snowflake or comparable modern data platforms; direct Snowflake experience is highly desirable.
· Comfort working across both mature systems and newer architectures rather than assuming that one technical paradigm fits every problem.
· Experience managing vendors and external engineering partners.
· Practical familiarity with contemporary AI-assisted software development and the rapidly evolving LLM and agent ecosystem.
· The judgment to distinguish useful engineering rigor from unnecessary process.
Experience in advertising, media, media measurement, ad tech, or media intelligence is strongly preferred. Experience working directly with Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) data is particularly valuable. Familiarity with advertisers, agencies, impressions, audience measurement, television/CTV advertising, or adjacent domains would allow you to come up to speed quickly on the problems we solve.
We care more about the depth of your experience and judgment than about checking every box on a technology list.
How You Lead Matters
They have deliberately built a company where talented people can work together without excessive hierarchy, internal politics, or ego. They intend to keep it that way as they grow.
The right VP of Engineering will be comfortable giving capable people considerable autonomy while recognizing problems early enough to coach, intervene, and help when needed.
You should be someone who:
· Coaches before controlling.
· Gives credit freely and accepts responsibility readily.
· Can disagree directly without becoming defensive or abrasive.
· Earns technical authority through judgment and competence rather than title.
· Listens and understands why an existing system or practice evolved before deciding that it needs to change.
· Is comfortable being surrounded by experienced people with strong opinions and specialized expertise.
· Enjoys teaching—and enjoys learning from the people you lead.
· Can introduce greater rigor without making a small organization feel like a large bureaucracy.
· Measures success partly by how capable and independent the people around you become.
We aren't looking for someone to make our client more corporate. They are looking for someone who can help a successful engineering culture mature and scale while retaining what is best about it.
What Success Looks Like
Within your first year, we would expect to see meaningful progress toward an engineering organization in which:
· Engineers have clear priorities, ownership, and accountability without needing constant executive follow-up.
· Delivery is increasingly predictable and visible.
· Testing, CI/CD, security, observability, and deployment practices have materially improved.
· Critical operational knowledge is distributed rather than concentrated in one person.
· Large data operations, migrations, upgrades, and production changes can be executed safely by the engineering organization without depending on the CTO as the sole technical operator.
· Their data pipelines are more reliable, understandable, testable, and maintainable.
· Application and data performance are measurably improving.
· Engineers are making effective use of AI-assisted development practices.
· Product and Sales see Engineering as a strong partner in turning market opportunities into capabilities customers can buy.
· The team feels that engineering leadership has become stronger without becoming heavier.
· The CTO can remain technically connected to the team while spending substantially more time on long-term technology strategy, AI experimentation, emerging capabilities, and the future of our client's products.
Ultimately, this role succeeds when our client's engineering organization becomes more capable without becoming more bureaucratic, more rigorous without becoming less inventive, and less dependent on any single individual without losing the benefits of deep technical expertise.
Why Our Client, Why Now
Our client has the advantages of an established company—real customers, mature products, valuable proprietary data, deep domain expertise, and years of accumulated technical knowledge—while facing the technical opportunities of a company entering a new stage of growth.
You'll work with trillion-row datasets, large-scale media intelligence, rapidly evolving advertising technologies, modern cloud and data platforms, and an industry being reshaped by streaming, connected television, automation, and artificial intelligence.
You'll also have unusual latitude to influence how we build.
They aren't committed to technology for technology's sake. They want to use the best tools—old or new—to solve difficult problems well. They want to preserve the systems and practices that work, improve the ones that don't, and aggressively explore technologies that create genuine advantage.
For the right technical leader, this is an opportunity to inherit something substantial rather than start from zero—and still have considerable freedom to shape what comes next.
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