Vice President, Engineering

At Submittable, we are transforming how organizations create social impact. Our platform empowers thousands of mission-driven organizations, from nonprofits to government entities, to make a difference in their communities and beyond. In 2024, our innovative software helped organizations worldwide run 30,000 programs, welcomed 1.2 million applicants, and facilitated the distribution of more than $10 billion in funding through our products on behalf of our clients.

We are on a mission to help organizations accelerate their impact, so we are proud to partner with organizations focused on Equity & Social Justice, Children & Education, Creative & Arts, Health & Wellness, Economic Justice & Opportunity, and Environment & Climate. At Submittable, technology and purpose converge, offering a unique opportunity to contribute to meaningful change.

About the Role Submittable is hiring a Vice President of Engineering who is deeply technical, works hands-on, and builds with AI every day. You will report to the CTO and run engineering day to day: delivery, quality, reliability, cost, and the people who make them happen.

We want a different VP than the old SaaS playbook produced. That playbook grew output by growing headcount and adding layers of management. We believe AI coding tools now let a small team of strong engineers ship what once took a team several times its size. We intend to run engineering that way. You will keep the organization lean, keep layers few, and raise output per engineer rather than the number of engineers.

You cannot lead that change from a slide deck. You need to know firsthand what it is like to ship production software with AI agents, including where they fail. We expect you to have done this yourself in the last 12 months and to keep doing it here. Plan on roughly a fifth of your week going to hands-on technical work: reading and writing code, reviewing pull requests, working incidents, and building the tools your teams use.

We are choosing depth over span. This is a hands-on leadership role for a small, senior team, not a role leading a large organization through layers of managers. If you want to make architecture calls, contribute and ship code, and help a lean team deliver well beyond its size, we want to talk.

What You'll Do

• Run engineering day to day. Turn the CTO's technical strategy and the product roadmap into plans, priorities, and shipped software.

• Stay hands-on. Review pull requests, prototype, debug production issues, and write tools. You should be able to pick up a ticket and ship it. Teams should trust your calls because of your technical judgment, not your title.

• Make AI the default way we build. Expect every engineer to work with AI coding agents (tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot) for design, coding, testing, and review. Show people how by doing it yourself, and remove whatever stops them.

• Measure what AI changes. Track the four DORA metrics (how often we deploy, how long a change takes to reach production, how often changes fail, and how fast we recover), plus defects that reach customers and engineering cost per release. Report plainly on where AI helps and where it creates new problems, such as oversized pull requests, thinner review, or code no one on the team understands.

• Keep the organization lean. Grow output faster than headcount. Keep management layers thin, expect managers to stay technical, and favor small teams with clear ownership over large teams that need heavy coordination. Before adding a person, ask whether better tooling or automation solves the problem.

• Automate the toil. Use AI and automation for test generation, CI/CD checks, code review assistance, release notes, incident triage, and alerting, so engineers spend their time on the product.

• Raise the technical bar. Set standards for architecture, code review, testing, CI/CD, release management, and incident response. Shipping mor...