VP of Software Engineering

Join Guild, a leading education and workforce development platform, as the VP of Software Engineering. In this role, you will lead our product, platform, and foundational engineering teams, driving technical and organizational direction, improving planning and shipping processes, and balancing software reliability with growth opportunities. You will also develop leaders and talent, build an inclusive engineering culture, and partner across the company.

• Set technical and organizational direction across product, platform, and foundational engineering, turning business strategy into a clear roadmap.
• Own how the organization plans and ships, improving predictability and throughput with lightweight processes, and clearing blockers.
• Lead through ambiguity to outcomes, bringing clarity to messy problems, deciding with incomplete information, and keeping teams focused on measurable impact.
• Strong cross-functional partnership — you build trust with Product, Design, and peer engineering leaders, and explain technical strategy and trade-offs clearly to both engineers and executives
• Demonstrated people-leadership as a manager of managers — you set clear standards, drive execution and remove blockers, grow talent through frequent, actionable feedback, and build psychologically safe, inclusive teams
• Comfort operating in ambiguity and driving to outcomes — you simplify complexity, make practical trade-offs with incomplete information, and orient teams around measurable impact rather than activity
• Deep technical credibility — you can weigh architectural decisions on their merits and earn the trust of senior engineers — plus the judgment to balance reliable, cost-aware systems with room for growth bets
• Proven ability to lead a multi-team engineering organization at the VP level — setting direction across several domains and owning outcomes across both product and platform engineering. You’re energized by leading well at this level and the scope it carries
• Experience scaling consumer or B2B2C growth-product engineering and/or internal developer platforms in a high-growth environment
• Familiarity with a modern AWS serverless stack (e.g., Lambda, Aurora), GraphQL, and the tooling that supports an AI-native software development lifecycle
• Background partnering with Data/AI engineering to ship AI-native product experiences
• Experience leading engineering through an AI-native transformation — building with AI as a first class citizen, agentic workflows, and platform guardrails responsibly