VP of Engineering, Applications

ABOUT THE ROLE

A1 is building a proactive AI chat app for everyday users to bring intelligence to conversations, errands, organising and workflows. Unlike traditional chat-based applications, our product focuses on achieving high reliability for long-running workflows, persistent context, and real-world task completion. The system must handle multi-step reasoning, interact with external tools, and remain reliable despite non-deterministic model behavior.

Turn intelligence into a real product. You are responsible for the engineering systems, teams, and execution that turn ML capability into reliable, fast, and intuitive user experiences across backend, mobile, and desktop platforms.

This role is a senior engineering leader who stays close to the product, makes hard technical decisions, and holds a high bar for quality and delivery.

WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING

- Own the application engineering strategy and execution across backend, mobile, and desktop.

- Lead and grow a small, senior applications team, including backend, mobile, and desktop engineers.

- Set the architectural direction for AI-powered product workflows, APIs, and client integrations.

- Ensure AI capabilities are integrated into the product with clear abstractions, predictable behavior, and graceful failure modes.

- Partner closely with Machine Learning leadership to translate model capability into shippable product features.

- Make high-impact decisions across latency, cost, reliability, security, and user experience.

- Establish clear ownership boundaries across backend, mobile, and desktop to prevent architectural drift.

- Ensure production readiness: observability, monitoring, retries, fallbacks, privacy, and cost controls.

- Balance speed and discipline – shipping quickly without compromising long-term system quality.

WHAT YOU WILL NEED

- Significant experience leading application or product engineering for complex systems.

- Strong hands-on background building and shippi...