Software Development, Software Project Mgr​/ Lead

Who Staffing is looking for a Vice President of Engineering for a full-time, direct hire opportunity with our client in Alexandria, VA.

Job Summary:

Our client is a media intelligence company operating at the intersection of advertising, data, technology, and a rapidly changing media landscape.

They got their start in political advertising, where they have built a particularly deep expertise, and today they are expanding aggressively across the broader advertising industry. They maintain a proprietary catalog of advertising creative, enrich it with extensive metadata, and combine it with large-scale Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) data and other sources to provide actionable media intelligence to advertisers, agencies, media buyers, and other customers.

This is an unusually dynamic time to be working in their industry. Linear television continues to give way to connected television and streaming. Advertising channels and buying practices are changing. Search, discovery, and consumer behavior are being reshaped by AI. At the same time, advances in large language models, agents, and machine-to-machine integration are changing what is possible in both software and information products.

Our client is entering its next stage of growth, and they are hiring a Vice President of Engineering to help them build the engineering organization and technical capabilities they will need for that future.

The Role:

The VP of Engineering will report to the CTO and assume primary responsibility for the day-today leadership and operation of our client's engineering function.

This is not a role for someone who wants to arrive with a large-company playbook and impose it wholesale. Nor is it primarily an administrative management position. They are looking for a hands-on technical leader who can understand their systems deeply, earn the confidence of a small and experienced team, improve the way they build and operate software, and help them evolve without losing the qualities that have made them successful.

The role has three equally important dimensions:

Technical depth
. You should be capable of getting close to difficult systems, data, and code; evaluating complex technical work; troubleshooting when necessary; and making sound architectural and engineering decisions.

Operational leadership. You will take ownership of engineering execution: priorities, delivery, technical operations, engineering practices, and the day-to-day management of the engineering team. You will help make our clients’ systems and their engineering organization more reliable, scalable, and less dependent on any single person.

Cultural stewardship. Our client is a thoughtful, collaborative, low-ego company. They value capable people who trust one another and enjoy working together. Your job is to strengthen that culture as they grow—not replace it with bureaucracy, politics, or unnecessary process.

A major measure of success will be creating an engineering organization that can operate effectively and independently while allowing their CTO to spend substantially more time on longer-horizon technology strategy, AI, experimentation, industry evolution, and new product capabilities.

What You’ll Own

You will directly lead their internal engineering team and take responsibility for the team's execution, development, and performance. You will work closely with the CTO while increasingly becoming the person who ensures that engineering commitments actually become reliable production systems.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Lead, coach, and develop their engineering team, including regular management, prioritization, task tracking, feedback, and removal of blockers.
• Own day-to-day engineering execution and delivery, including sprint-level planning…