The posting
Total Expert is the Customer Operating System for financial services. Banks, credit unions, and mortgage lenders use our platform to turn data into relationships, and since 2016 it has enabled more than $7 trillion in funded loan volume. Our customers work in a regulated, high-stakes industry, run on legacy systems they can't replace, and need software that fits how their people actually work. Those are hard problems, and they reward engineers who get close to the customer and take ownership of outcomes.
We're also growing from a mortgage platform into one that serves banking, wealth, and insurance, and the products this role owns are where customers will feel that growth first. The work ahead is significant: a new orchestration engine that replaces seven legacy marketing automation systems, a migration of our Contact Service off the monolith, and lasting improvements to SMS reliability.
AI is changing what engineering work looks like. More of the mechanical work is being done by tools; more of the value is in judgment, review, customer understanding, and the ability to lead change. Most companies will add AI and get complexity. A few will turn it into a real operating advantage. We intend to be one of the few, and that comes down to people and culture more than technology.
We're building our Engineering and Product culture around three principles. You'll be the person who turns them into daily habits:
- Reality is the referee. Decisions settle on customer outcomes and evidence, not title, opinion, or "that's how my last company did it." If something is working, we double down. If it isn't, we stop.
- Disagreement is a duty. Raising a concern isn't a personality trait or a risk. It's part of the job, and we build mechanisms that make it safe and expected.
- Fix the system, not the person. When something breaks, including a hire, a team, or a project, we ask what allowed it to happen and fix that.
The role
We're hiring a VP, Engineering to lead our Applications engineering organization, the customer-facing products our users work in every day. You'll report to our SVP, Engineering, and act as the SVP’s partner and #2.
You'll help shape our technical strategy and roadmap, alongside the SVP. You'll lead three engineering managers and roughly half of Engineering across six product areas, and you'll own delivery and quality for all of them. But your most important job is the people doing the work: developing leaders, setting clear expectations, holding people to them, and coaching them to get better.
This is not a role for someone who wants to run a bigger org chart. It's for a technically strong leader who builds teams that solve real customer problems, and who builds the system that keeps producing those teams after they've moved on.
What you'll own
Six product areas: Journeys and Campaigns, SMS and Communications, CRM and Lead Management, Content, Contact Service, and Mobile. Within them, four programs will define the year:
- The orchestration engine. The largest delivery commitment in Engineering: a multi-workstream program replacing seven legacy marketing automation systems with a single graph-based, event-driven engine.
- The Contact Service migration. A strangler fig migration that moves Contact Service off our monolith.
- Communications reliability. Structural improvements to SMS reliability, including CI gates, contract tests, and canary deploys, plus the team habits that make them stick.
- Multi-vertical readiness. Making sure campaigns, communications, CRM, and content work as first-class parts of our platform as we expand into banking, wealth, and insurance, not as bolt-ons.
You'll help shape the technical direction for these programs, with the SVP making the final call. You're accountable for landing them: the plan, the sequencing, the tradeoffs, the people, and the results.
What you'll be doing
- Develop leaders. Coach your managers and the technical leaders under them to know each person's superpowers and weak spots, manage to strengths, and use real stretch assignments to grow people faster. Build a bench so that key roles have successors. Expect this to be where most of your time goes.
- Hold teams accountable, with intent, not oversight. Set clear goals and make sure every team knows what it owns and what it committed to. Let teams decide how to get there, then hold them to it. Replace status meetings and approval chains with visible commitments, peer accountability, and direct customer feedback. When something slips, raise it early and directly. Fix the system first; when the issue is performance, coach it, and act when coaching isn't working.
- Shape the technical strategy, then deliver it. Bring a strong point of view to architecture, technical strategy, and roadmap decisions, with the SVP making the final call. Then translate those decisions into plans and team commitments across all six product areas. Balance the big architectural programs against the everyday delivery, reliability, and customer commitments that come with owning the products customers see. Stay close enough to the architecture, domain models, and key design decisions to spot drift early and raise concerns with evidence.
- Raise the talent bar, with our People team. Partner with People and Talent Acquisition on how we hire and onboard engineers. Define what great looks like for each role, make sure engineering interviewers are trained and calibrated, and own the hiring decisions for your org. Hire for learning speed, ownership, and low ego over pedigree.
- Grow and keep great engineers. Own how engineers and managers in your organization develop, advance, and stay. Build one team across our US and India locations on purpose, with the same standards, the same access to context, and the same paths to grow. Make Engineering a place strong people want to join and don't want to leave.
- Make reliability and learning structural. Run blameless reviews on incidents and on people issues like attrition, missed hires, and engagement drops. Land the guardrails that prevent repeat incidents, especially on the communication products where customers notice failures first. Make sure every fix lands in how we work, not in a document nobody reads.
- Lead change well. Bring people along on hard changes by understanding what they're protecting, treating constraints as design input, and closing every loop you open. Turn skeptical senior engineers into champions. Replacing seven legacy systems will test this.
- Get engineers closer to customers and Product. Organize around customer problems where it makes sense, and build tight loops between customer-facing engineers, Product, and the platform. Our application products are where Product has the strongest opinions and customers have the loudest voice. You'll be the engineering voice that keeps delivery realism and technical health in the conversation.
- Lead Engineering through the AI shift. Help our engineers move toward higher-judgment work as AI tools take on more of the mechanical work, while protecting quality through clear review, testing, and approval standards. Own AI adoption across your organization, including AI code review coverage and accepted AI-authored code, and use the tools yourself. Treat it as a culture shift, not a tooling rollout.
- Partner with the SVP, Engineering. Own execution and the people side of Applications so the SVP can spend more time on technology and strategy across Engineering. Bring your own view on technical direction, disagree directly when it matters, and present a united front once a decision is made.
What success looks like
- First 90 days: You know every manager and their teams. You've seen real work, real incidents, and real customer escalations, not just dashboards. You and the SVP have agreed on how you'll split the work. You've shared a written read on the org's strengths, gaps, top people risks, and top delivery risks, and every team has clear, visible commitments.
- 6 months: Blameless reviews and a working dissent practice are in place. The SMS reliability guardrails are live and teams use them. Working with the People team, our engineering interview process is updated and interviewers are calibrated. Every manager can name each report's strengths and weak spots. The orchestration engine and Contact Service migration have plans you and the SVP trust, and they're tracking to them.
- 12 months: Regretted attrition is down, new engineering hires are ramping well, and at least two people have been promoted into bigger scope. The major programs are hitting the milestones you committed to, and customer-facing incidents are down. AI adoption is measurably up across your teams. The SVP's time is going to technology and strategy, not day-to-day delivery.
What we're looking for
- Typically 15+ years building and operating enterprise SaaS, including 5+ years leading engineering organizations through managers, ideally in B2B SaaS, fintech, or another complex, regulated enterprise setting.
- A track record of building strong engineering teams, including distributed and global teams: setting a high hiring bar in partnership with recruiting, and developing engineers and managers into bigger roles. You can name the people you've grown and where they are now.
- A record of holding teams to their commitments while keeping their trust, including turning a team around after missed deliveries or production incidents.
- A strong technical background, with hands-on experience in customer-facing applications, event-driven and distributed systems at scale, and legacy modernization. Experience with marketing automation, communications (email and SMS), or CRM platforms in multi-tenant environments is a strong plus.
- Technical credibility with engineers. You're as comfortable in a design review or an incident review as you are in a roadmap conversation with Product. You don't need to be the best architect in the room. You need to understand the architecture well enough to shape it and deliver it, and you need to build the room.
- Experience leading large, multi-team programs from design through production delivery.
- Real examples of leading change through resistance, including winning over respected senior people who didn't want the change.
- A history of partnering with a strong technical leader, helping shape their strategy, executing it well, and making them more effective.
- Personal use of AI tools in your engineering work, a point of view on how AI changes engineering teams, roles, and quality practices, and ideally experience driving that adoption across teams.
How you work
Our four core values, and what they mean in this role:
- Customer obsession. Everything starts with the customer. You know how they use what your teams build, you get engineers in front of them, and you measure success by the value customers get, not features shipped.
- Grit and resilience. Hard programs, production incidents, and setbacks don't knock you off course. You own outcomes end to end, give credit away, talk about failures plainly, and keep your teams steady.
- Speed. You move fast and help your teams do the same. You decide quickly on good evidence, remove blockers, and change course when the evidence says so.
- Excellence. You hold a high bar for people, code, and reliability, and you're direct and fair about it. You set clear expectations, give feedback early, and follow up, so people always know where they stand.
What this role isn't
- Not the final word on technical direction. You'll have real input into architecture and technical strategy, and the SVP, Engineering has the final say. You'll complement the SVP, not compete.
- Not a hands-off role. You'll stay close enough to the designs, the code, and the incidents to know something is off before a dashboard tells you.
- Not a "bring the playbook from my last company" role. We want you to bring what you've learned and tell us why it will work here.
- Not a role where the first answer to a problem is a reorg, a new process, or a personnel change.
Compensation and benefits
The anticipated base salary range for this role is $240,000 to $280,000 annually. Final total compensation offered is dependent upon the selected individual's qualifications and experience. This position is also eligible for an annual discretionary bonus based on company performance and other factors. As an employee of the company, you will be eligible to participate in the Employee Stock Option Plan. Total Expert offers a competitive range of benefits including Medical, Dental, Vision, HSA (Health Savings Account), FSA (Flexible Spending Accounts), company-paid Life Insurance, Short-Term Disability, Long-Term Disability, Flexible Time-Off (FTO), Paid Parental Leave, and 401(k) with employer match.
Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment visa at this time.
Equal opportunity
Total Expert is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We welcome candidates from all backgrounds and evaluate everyone on the same criteria. If you need a reasonable accommodation during the application or interview process, please contact us.
