VP, AI Platform

About Engine Engine is the AI-native platform for intelligent travel. For a decade, Engine has built the proprietary technology and supply behind modern business travel, serving over 40,000 customers and nearly 2 million travelers, along with leading travel and AI companies that build on Engine's infrastructure. One system powers business travel, group travel, human agents, and AI agents. That work has earned recognition as one of Fast Company's Best Workplaces for Innovators (2025), TravelTech's Reservation Platform of the Year (2026), and one of Built In's Best Places to Work (2020–2026). We're looking for bold, ambitious people to help redefine how businesses manage and experience travel. Working here, you can expect exponential growth, an ambitious pace, full ownership, and high-caliber colleagues who push you to do the best work of your career. Every hire raises the bar. Come outpace the ordinary and build the future of travel with us. The Opportunity Engine is scaling fast: 1,000+ employees, moving upmarket, and using AI to fuel growth. The proof is already in production: 95.2% of merged production code is AI written, we ship roughly 1,300 pull requests a week (up from 800 a year ago, with fewer engineers), and we have restructured teams from 7 engineers to 5 with a gated path to 3. This is one of the most AI mature engineering organizations anywhere, and it is about to go further. To do that coherently, Engine is standing up an AI native operating model with three coequal foundations: AI Platform builds the technical rails, Applied AI ships workflow redesign embedded in every domain, and Workforce Transformation updates the operating system. You lead the first. AI Platform is what everything runs on. Without a single, trusted stack, every team forks its own plumbing and no one can measure or govern what ships. You will not be starting from zero: you inherit a founding team that includes a Principal Architect, a Principal Engineer dedicated to the AI harness, staff level product operations and analytics, and open reqs in flight. As the founding VP, you set the technical strategy, build hands on in the early phase, and scale the org through a Director and principal engineers as adoption proves out. You sit on The Triad with the Senior Director, Applied AI and the Senior Director, Workforce Transformation, prioritizing the enterprise AI roadmap and resolving cross domain calls. What You'll Own • AI Platform core. The LLM gateway, agent framework, prompt and agent libraries, and evaluation infrastructure: the rails every Applied AI team and every engineer builds on. • Developer experience and the Velocity program. The AI harness, coding agents, testing and autonomy frameworks, and the coverage gates that unlock code merging without human review. This group owns Engine's product delivery cycle time number and is the engine that turns 95.2% AI written code into true autonomy. It is the crown jewel of the role. • Product operations, rebuilt as software. We believe product operations becomes an AI native function. This team builds and runs that software: instrumented cadences, automated reporting, gap analysis, and the PD maturity scorecard. It runs the machinery of the PDLC, not the judgment inside it. An AI Product Ops Lead reports into this role. • Automation engineering and APIs. Shared APIs, orchestration, and integrations: the rails every automation across Engine uses. • AI data infrastructure. The AI consumable layer: retrieval and RAG infrastructure, context pipelines for agents and the knowledge base, evaluation datasets, agent memory, and usage telemetry. This layer consumes Engine's data warehouse through governed interfaces; the warehouse, pipelines, and data quality remain with the Data organization. • O