VP Engineering

Who we are Lemrock builds the infrastructure of agentic commerce. Tomorrow, consumers won't just buy on e-commerce websites. They will discover, compare and purchase directly inside conversational AI interfaces like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and a growing long tail of specialized AI assistants. For brands, this is a major shift: if they are not present in these environments, they become invisible. Our mission: enable any brand to exist, sell and distribute in this new channel. We raised a €7M seed round (the first in Europe on this market), with Jean-Baptiste Rudelle, founder of Criteo, on our board, and the Bpifrance DeepTech label. Today, Lemrock is already: • 100M+ conversations per month • 150+ brand clients • a $100B market structuring at high speed Context You'll join a small, high-ownership engineering team (software, AI, data) building production systems that serve millions of users. We care deeply about code quality and clean architecture, and we intend to keep it that way as we scale. Lemrock is accelerating and the team is about to grow. As our VP Engineering, you own how engineering runs: the team, the way we deliver, and the technical roadmap. You report to our CTO, who keeps the product and technical vision. Your mission Team & hiring • Grow the engineering team: build the hiring plan with the founders, run the process and hold the bar • Manage the engineers day to day: 1:1s, feedback, career paths, then the first layer of leads as the team grows • Keep a culture where ownership, code quality and speed go together Delivery & process • Take the product inputs, prioritise with the CTO, staff each project and commit to dates you hold • Set up the process the team needs at its size, no more: planning, rituals, code review, incident handling • Make capacity and trade-offs visible to the founders, early Technical direction • Own the technical roadmap and turn new product bets into scoped, staffed projects • Make the architecture, infrastructure and tooling calls with the CTO and the senior engineers • Own reliability, security and infrastructure costs as traffic and integrations grow • Stay close to the code: design reviews, code reviews, and shipping yourself when it unblocks the team AI-native engineering • Scale the way the team builds with AI agents (Claude Code, Cursor): shared practices and tooling, so we go faster without lowering the quality bar After 6 months • The team has grown with engineers who raise the bar, and everyone ships every week • Delivery is predictable: the founders know what lands when, and it lands • The technical roadmap runs through you, and the CTO is back on product and vision Candidate profile • 10+ years of software engineering, including 3+ years managing engineers • Has grown an engineering team at an early-stage startup (seed to Series B): hiring, structuring and delivering through the growth • Strong technical background: has built and owned production backend systems, and can challenge an architecture choice on the merits • Has run delivery hand in hand with product: priorities, planning, trade-offs • Uses AI coding tools every day and has brought a team along • Ex-CTO, ex-founder or first engineering leader of a startup: a strong fit • Professional proficiency in French & English Tech stack TypeScript, NestJS, React, PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, GCP (Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, BigQuery), Terraform, LLM integrations. A similar stack is a plus, not a requirement. Why join us • Join a company in early breakout mode, already generating revenue, with a clear technological edge and strong financial backing to fuel its growth • Work directly with an experienced team: two repeat YC founders who've scaled product & tech before, a former strategy/innovation director (10 years