What are the responsibilities and job description for the VP, Engineering position at Applause?
We're seeking an experienced VP of Engineering to join our leadership team and report directly to our Co-Founder/CTO, Scott Rogers. This is a critical management-focused role where you'll lead our entire development team, recruit and ramp new engineers, and scale processes in order to help take the department to the next level.
Responsibilities:
Qualifications:
Benefits: 100% remote w/ no office mandate | Unlimited PTO | 22 official company holidays | Health care | Life insurance | Stock options | Amazing colleagues | Energetic culture that is positive and celebrates together | Inspiring mission & software product | Ability to grow your career by being early in a fast-growing tech startup
Responsibilities:
- Team Leadership & Development
- Lead, mentor, and grow the engineering team across all functions (backend, frontend, mobile, DevOps, QA)
- Recruit, onboard, and retain exceptional engineering talent
- Foster a culture of collaboration, innovation, ownership, and continuous improvement
- Conduct regular 1-on-1s, performance reviews, and provide coaching to develop future leaders
- Product Development & Execution
- Partner closely with Product leadership to translate the product roadmap into engineering deliverables
- Own sprint planning, resource allocation, and delivery timelines across all engineering initiatives
- Ensure predictable, reliable product releases with minimal bugs and strong quality assurance
- Drive alignment between engineering capacity and product priorities
- Engineering Excellence & Quality
- Establish and enforce code quality standards, testing practices, and peer review processes
- Implement CI/CD pipelines and development workflows that enable rapid, safe deployments
- Build quality assurance processes, including automated testing, code coverage, and monitoring
- Create technical documentation standards and knowledge-sharing practices
- Foster engineering best practices around system design, security, and performance optimization
- Technical Strategy & Operations
- Collaborate with Lead Developer on technical vision and long-term technology strategy
- Make build vs. buy decisions and evaluate new technologies, frameworks, and tools
- Oversee infrastructure planning, capacity management, and cloud optimization
- Ensure system reliability, uptime, and performance meet SLA commitments
- Manage engineering budget and resource planning
- Implement metrics and KPIs to measure team productivity, quality, and velocity
Qualifications:
- 10 years in software engineering with 4 years in engineering leadership roles (Director or VP level)
- Proven track record of scaling engineering teams from 5-10 to 20-50 engineers
- Experience managing managers and building organizational structures
- Demonstrated success delivering complex SaaS products in fast-paced startup environments
- Strong background in modern web app development and cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
- Experience implementing engineering processes, standards, and best practices from the ground up
- Track record of successful collaboration with Product teams to execute roadmaps
- Detail-oriented with strong problem-solving abilities
- Very effective in a remote work environment
- Previous experience at a Series A or Series B SaaS company during hypergrowth (2-5x growth)
- Hands-on technical background with the ability to review architecture and code when needed
- Experience with modern tech stacks (React, Node.js, Python, Go, microservices, etc.)
- Experience with distributed teams or remote-first engineering cultures
- History of successful technical hiring and building talent pipelines
Benefits: 100% remote w/ no office mandate | Unlimited PTO | 22 official company holidays | Health care | Life insurance | Stock options | Amazing colleagues | Energetic culture that is positive and celebrates together | Inspiring mission & software product | Ability to grow your career by being early in a fast-growing tech startup
