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Agent guide: [/agents.md](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/agents.md). --- # VP of AI Engineering - **Company:** PROVN INC - **Location:** Seattle, WA, United States (Remote available) - **Experience:** Expert - **Salary:** $200,000 - $275,000 - **Contract:** Permanent contract - **Skills:** AI Evaluation, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Artificial Intelligence, Automation of Tests, Code Generation, Software Debugging, Programming Tools, Regression Testing, Data Logging, Large Language Models, Claude Code - **Published:** October 31, 2026 - **Apply:** https://www.careerbuilder.com/job-details/vp-of-ai-engineering-seattle-wa--a683cbe4-4c6d-4e50-99fe-f330a042f594 ## About the Role Artificial Intelligence (AI), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Team Building, Team Lead/Manager, Military, Startup, Secondary School, Leadership, Product/Service Launch, Product Management, We place more weight on what you've built, your impact on users, your production judgment, and your ability to raise the level of your teammates than on executive titles, pedigree, or years managing large teams. No degree required. * You've personally built and shipped LLM-enabled applications used by real people, as a founder, founding engineer, staff or principal engineer, or deeply hands-on engineering leader * Advanced fluency with multi-model agentic development tools (Claude Code, Codex, or similar), plus the ability to inspect, test, debug, and improve AI-generated code * Practical experience with LLM orchestration and tool calling, retrieval and grounding, persistent context, APIs, reliable application state, and full-stack cloud deployments * Strong product instincts. You can design for teenagers and adults with different levels of experience, find the friction, simplify, and move users from exploring to finishing a real step * The judgment to make an early product secure and scalable without overengineering it, from trust boundaries, authorization, and logging to error handling, regression testing, monitoring, and the limits of LLM decision-making * You've mentored a small engineering team and improved its speed and quality. You earn engineers' respect through your own work, give honest, constructive feedback, and adapt your coaching for senior, mid-level, and early-career engineers * Mission-driven. You want your work to have a direct impact on people's economic mobility, and you're energized by working with students, partners, and end users Nice to Have * Leadership experience at a startup, or time at an engineering organization working at the cutting edge of AI development * Experience building products for schools, public sector agencies, or other institutional partners * Experience presenting a product to funders or senior stakeholders and answering hard questions on the spot * Experience with student data privacy and with identity and access for users under 18 ## Description Alongside the building, you keep engineering, product, partners, and leadership moving together, and you work directly with end users far more than most engineering leaders do. * Ship simple, mobile-first AI experiences that turn real learner and job seeker problems into completed next steps, with deep context awareness, more agency for users, and handoffs to human advisors when they need one * Build AI-native and multiply the team's output. Use coding agents yourself to ship working software fast, coach engineers in using them well, and help define the team's agentic development lifecycle: clear objectives and acceptance criteria, adversarial multi-model passes on the spec, and a strong evaluation harness * Connect product analytics, AI evaluation, synthetic-user tests, user research, and real task outcomes to fast release decisions, and show improvements with evidence * Create reusable conversation, planning, resource-grounding, state, and action patterns that can be configured quickly for new personas, scenarios, localities, and partners * Take features through controlled production, owning architecture, data and state integrity, test automation, observability, performance, cloud cost, and release quality * Architect identity and access for learners, advisors, and partner institutions, including privacy-preserving sign-in, consent, delegated access, and role-based authorization. Outside security and privacy specialists support hardening, reviews, and compliance, and you own integrating their work into the product * Be the technical voice with funders and state agency partners, including answering their hardest questions about safety and outcomes What Success Looks Like * Within the first months, Pathways reaches high school students after a few rapid cycles of engineering and hardening * Within six months, it serves thousands of high school users * Within twelve months, it's adapted for many personas, each tied to a real outcome such as enrolling in a post-secondary program, starting an apprenticeship, or getting a job, on the way to about 100,000 users in Washington State * The team ships faster and with higher quality because of how you build and how you coach