VP, Engineering

We are hiring a VP of Engineering for a leading technology marketplace being relaunched under new ownership. The platform now processes hundreds of millions of API calls a day and simplifies how millions of developers discover, test, and pay for thousands of public APIs: a single key, a single bill, in-browser testing, code snippets in every major language, across categories from data and sports to communications and AI. It is rare for a developer platform to earn its scale by genuinely removing friction.

Your role is full technical ownership of a live system at scale: architecture, unit economics, reliability, and the team that builds on all of it. This is high-scale technology marketplace infrastructure leadership, similar in shape and stakes to Twilio, Stripe, or Plaid. You’ll hire engineers excited to ship into something already used by millions, sharpen the platform as you run it, and build the first generation of agent-native infrastructure on top.

Agents, not just humans, are becoming first-class callers of APIs, at machine speed and scale. The same primitives that made this marketplace work for developers (discovery, a single key, instant testing, programmable billing) are exactly what agents need, with an MCP foothold already on the platform. Agent-native discovery, agent-native commerce, and agent-native governance are not adjacent products to ship later. They are part of the thing we are building. Few platforms anywhere are as well-positioned to define how agents and APIs meet on the open internet, and few teams will get this chance.

This is a leadership role with full technical authority. Ambitious, focused.

Roles and Responsibilities

• Platform Architecture & Scale — Own end-to-end architecture across a multi-region AWS stack: management plane, runtime/proxy, commerce backbone, data plane, ~40 microservices. Design for horizontal scale, traffic spikes, and unpredictable backend APIs.
• Commerce Infrastructure — Own the usage ledger as a system of record. Keep metering, billing, invoicing, and publisher payouts on Stripe and PayPal accurate, auditable, and replayable.
• Developer, Consumer & Publisher Experience — Lift NPS through intuitive UI/UX, fast onboarding, clear diagnostics, and rapid time-to-first-successful-call.
• Reliability, Security & Abuse Prevention — Build resilience against free-tier abuse, key leakage, and malicious traffic. Own rate limiting, auth (OAuth2/JWT/mTLS), tenant isolation, and security posture.
• Vendor & Cost Discipline — Simplify a complex multi-vendor stack (monitoring, analytics, CDP, support, CDN). Drive consolidation, contract optimisation, and cloud cost reduction.
• Agent-Native Primitives — Build the first generation of agent-native primitives — discovery, commerce, and governance — into the platform.
• LLM-Enabled Engineering Productivity — Leverage advances in LLM-based coding and agentic tooling to evolve the software development process, improving engineering velocity, code quality, and cost efficiency across the stack.
• Engineering Organisation & Production Operations — Hire and lead the founding engineering organisation across platform, billing, data, UI/UX, and security; establish engineer-owned quality and on-call discipline.
• Leadership Partnership — Partner with the CEO, COO, and Financial Controller on strategy, vendor management, and unit economics.

What success looks like

• The first generation of agent-native primitives — discovery, commerce, and governance — live in production, with growing agent traffic and architecture set up to compound.
• LLM-enabled coding and development workflows are deeply integrated into engineering, materially improving velocity, code quality, and cost efficiency.
• Reliability and security at marketplace scale — uptime ≥99.95%, billing and payouts publishers count on, security audits are clean.
• Developer and publisher experience that gets visibly better every quarter — activation, time-to-first-successful-call, dispute resolution, and trust metrics all climbing.
• A platform that gets cheaper to run as it grows, with a disciplined and consolidated software stack.
• An engineering org you’d want to join — full strength, owning production end-to-end, shipping at a confident cadence.

What you bring to the role

• 10+ years of engineering leadership; built and grown teams from <10 to 100+ in platform or marketplace environments.
• Hands-on track record of scaling revenue-critical or commerce infrastructure without downtime; lived through scale-outages, billing disputes, or abuse/fraud incidents and fixed them.
• Hands-on AWS experience at scale (EKS, MSK / Kinesis, Aurora, Lambda, DMS) and ClickHouse / Snowflake / Kafka data stacks; fluency in at least one core platform language (Node.js/TypeScript, Go, Python, or Java).
• Some experience building or working with agentic systems and/or LLM-based applications.
• Distributed, event-driven systems running at scale in revenue-impacting environments; exposure to API gateways, rate limiting, quota enforcement, usage metering, or billing integration is a plus.
• Modern engineering practice across observability, SLOs, on-call, IaC, and safe rollouts.
• Security, compliance, and vendor discipline — zero-trust, secrets, SOC2/ISO27001, and consolidating engineering vendor stacks.
• Experience with API ecosystems; exposure to agent protocols (MCP, A2A, x402) is a plus.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field; equivalent practical experience welcome.
• You build at the frontier. You build the team that builds with you. You build the cost discipline that lets innovation compound.