VP Engineering at Terawork

Role purpose

The VP Engineering is accountable for the engineering function operating at standard, every day, without anyone in particular in the room. The seat owns the Daily Engineering Kaizen, sprint and delivery cadence, the engineering KPI scoreboard, the hiring loop, the 30-day onboarding ramp, and operating-system adoption. The seat is held to the two-week test: when any single engineering leader is absent for two weeks, the function continues at standard. Including you.

What you will be doing every day

Operating cadence and discipline

• Chair the Daily Engineering Kaizen — the 30-minute heartbeat ritual that opens the engineering day. Six standing blocks: pre-read review, domain status, open incidents, standards review, encoded rules check, day-ahead commitments. Calendar invite mandatory; cancellation triggers function-level review.
• Enforce sprint cadence across all engineering squads: no sprint without a Sprint Goal; no story without acceptance criteria in given/when/then form; Sprint Goal achievement scored at retrospective. The tracker enforces the rule; you enforce the tracker.
• Operate standards-with-consequences at the operational level — the discipline that turns written standards into binding standards. Drift between a written standard and operating reality is a defect, not a soft norm. You are held to this first.

People — hiring loop and team development

• Run the engineering hiring loop end-to-end. Operate a values-first hiring rubric: values first, attitude second, talent third. No offer without panel-chair sign-off.
• Land priority hires in sequence agreed with the CTO and the CEO: Chief Information Security Officer, Head of Platform Engineering, Quality Engineering Lead, Processing Engineering Manager, and the senior individual contributors that close the deputy bench.
• Co-author Win-Win Performance Agreements with each direct report — Desired Results, Guidelines, Resources, Accountability, Consequences — anchored on a named personal goal. Quarterly skill-and-will recalibration.
• Operate the 30-day onboarding ramp test per hire. Day-30 ramp pass is a function-level commitment, not an exception.

Build the deputy bench. Every senior engineering seat carries a named, trained, tested backup. Succession is designed, not assumed.

Delivery performance — the KPI scoreboard

• Custodian of the engineering KPI scoreboard. Per-domain KPIs with weights summing to 100% per role card. Monthly scoreboard review at the Architecture Forum. Any KPI without a dashboard is removed; any dashboard without a named owner is reassigned.
• Land top-tier delivery performance on the four standard engineering metrics: deployment frequency (multiple times per day, on-demand); lead time from code commit to running in production (under one day); change failure rate (under 15%); mean time to restore service (under one hour). These are the four DORA metrics at the Elite tier — the benchmark established by Google\'s DevOps Research and Assessment programme, externally legible, measurable.
• Hold engineering toil under 50%. Lift test coverage materially. Bring service-level indicators live across all critical surfaces.
• Operate the Error Budget Policy at the function level: automated deploy-freeze at 50% burn is policy, not negotiation; weekly review at 25% burn.

Operating system adoption

• Own the operating-system adoption tracker. Run the three-people test: when three engineers are asked the same standards question, they give the same answer. The path to that consistency is your work.
• Operate documents-not-applied as a defect, not a soft norm. The CTO holds architectural enforcement; the VP Engineering holds operational enforcement.
• Build the function to pass the two-week test — when any single engineering leader (including you) is absent for two weeks, the function continues at standard. This is the seat\'s defining commitment.

Cross-functional partnership

• Operate the cross-functional engineering charter — the named interfaces between engineering and Business Intelligence, Treasury, Finance, People, Customer Operations, Risk and Compliance, Legal, Commercial, Account Management, Marketing, Partnerships, Audit and Internal Control. Each interface has a named liaison, an SLA, and a defined mode of interaction. Quarterly SLA review; breaches surface within 24 hours.
• Operate the Service Registry: every service has a named owner, a named backup, a tier classification, a runbook, and recovery objectives. Zero orphan services.
• Coordinate with the senior IC layer of engineering — a Member of Technical Staff who holds the company\'s most existential technical builds — as peer collaborator, not as a reporting authority. The two seats are designed to be complementary.

Our technology

A snapshot of what you would operate against.

Application layer

• Backend: Node.js (TypeScript), Express; some Go services emerging.
• Frontend: React, Redux, TypeScript, Tailwind.
• Data: MongoDB (primary), PostgreSQL/Aurora for ledger adjacent services, Neo4j for graph, Elastic for search.
• Async and caching: RabbitMQ, Redis.
• Infrastructure: AWS, with a deliberate re-platforming roadmap toward event-driven, modular-standard patterns.

Financial-controls architecture

• A purpose-built financial ledger as the single source of financial truth — double-entry, immutable, bi-temporal. Every transaction debits, credits, and reconciles atomically.
• Versioned, programmable transaction templates generated from Chart of Accounts and General-Ledger Mappings. Corrections are appended bi-temporally, never edit history.
• Ports & Adapters (Hexagonal) design: domain logic remains unaware of the ledger implementation; the ledger is reached only through Repositories and a dedicated client adapter.
• Outbox pattern for reliable event publishing from the Wallet/Ledger Service.

AI-leveraged engineering

• Assisted coding embedded in the development workflow.
• Production AI surfaces — customer-facing intelligence and internal automation.
• A unified intelligence layer ingesting service indicators, incidents, code, decision records, and operational telemetry —queryable in natural language.
• Agentic-coding infrastructure on the sequenced roadmap.

Observability and reliability

• New Relic for service-level indicators.
• Error Budget Policy enforced via automated deploy-freeze.
• Four Golden Signals (latency, traffic, errors, saturation) on every customer-facing service.

Leadership and team development

• Lead the engineering function operationally. Visible, present, in the standup. Catch-ball before assignment. Documents-not-applied is a defect; visible-not-distant is the operating mode.
• Inherit, coach, and develop the Domain Engineering Leaders — Processing, Global Payment Systems, Platform Core, Internal Tooling and AI, Infrastructure and DevOps, Quality Engineering — plus cross-cutting SRE, Security, and AI Team leads.
• Co-author each direct report\'s performance agreement. Hold quarterly skill-and-will recalibration. Hold yourself to standards-with-consequences first.
• Build succession: every critical engineering seat carries a named, trained, tested backup.
• Represent the engineering function operationally in the Executive Leadership Team. The CTO represents engineering strategically; you represent it operationally.
• Hire deliberately. No offer without panel-chair sign-off.

What we look for in you

Must have on day one

• 10+ years of engineering experience, with at least 4 years in VP Engineering, Director of Engineering, or Head of Engineering seats.
• Software engineering credibility. You read architecture decision records, sign them, and can call out a design flaw. You can have a substantive conversation about Hexagonal architecture, event-driven patterns, idempotency, outbox patterns, double-entry ledger discipline — and have implemented at least three of them.
• Track record of operating an engineering operating system that produced measurable top-tier delivery performance (the four DORA metrics at the Elite tier) and a generative engineering culture. You have done this before, not read about it.
• Strong hiring credibility. You have built panel discipline, operated a values-first hiring rubric, and held the line on no-offer-without-panel-sign-off in a fast-growing team.
• Distributed-systems experience in production. You have lived through failure modes — split-brain, cascading failures, data corruption recovery, multi-region consistency — not read about them.
• AI-leveraged engineering operations. You see AI as engineering substrate — assisted coding, agentic workflows, AI-assisted PR review — as part of how engineering operates day-to-day, not as marketing surface.
• Regulated-money-movement experience preferred (payments, banking, ledger, FX, settlement). Adjacent regulated-data contexts considered with strong distributed-systems foundation.

Leadership track record

• You build the function to operate without you in the room. Your references describe teams that continued to deliver after you moved on.
• You take coaching publicly. The most senior person in this seat is also the most willing to be wrong publicly when the evidence warrants.
• You operate by standards and rituals, not by personality. You inherit existing work and refine it; you do not rewrite it for ego reasons.
• You operate cross-functionally at executive altitude — comfortable in conversations with the CFO on capital controls, Compliance on regulatory posture, Commercial on customer SLAs.

Education

• BSc in Engineering, Computer Science, Information Management, Data Science, Mathematics, or a related field. Master\'s degree is welcome but not required. Substantive operating credentials weigh more than academic credentials at this seat.