Vice President of Software Engineering

Vice President of Software Engineering – AI

Blue Sky is partnering with an established, growth-oriented technology company seeking a Vice President of Engineering to lead the continued development of its enterprise SaaS platform and growing portfolio of AI-enabled products.

This is a highly visible, hands-on leadership opportunity for an engineering executive who enjoys building teams, improving execution, and staying close to the technology. The VP of Software Engineering will have the opportunity to directly influence how products are built, how engineering operates, and how emerging AI capabilities are transformed into scalable, customer-facing solutions.

The ideal candidate has successfully led engineering and comfortable setting direction, developing people, solving delivery challenges, and diving into technical decisions when needed.

You will lead the application engineering function and own the overall effectiveness of software development and delivery.

Key responsibilities will include:

• Lead, coach, and develop a distributed software engineering organization.
• Improve development velocity and create a more consistent, predictable release cycle.
• Establish clear ownership and accountability across engineering teams and product areas.
• Remain actively engaged in architecture, technical decisions, and complex engineering challenges.
• Strengthen engineering practices across CI/CD, automated testing, security, reliability, scalability, observability, and production operations.
• Balance new product development with platform improvements and technical debt.
• Work directly with Product leadership to translate priorities into achievable engineering plans.
• Partner closely with AI leadership to move emerging AI capabilities from experimentation into reliable production applications.
• Establish practical engineering metrics around delivery, quality, productivity, and platform performance.
• Develop engineering leaders while maintaining a highly collaborative, accountable, and execution-focused culture.

A significant part of this role will involve integrating AI capabilities into an established SaaS product environment.

We are seeking someone who has personally participated in taking AI-enabled functionality into production, rather than only overseeing AI strategy or experimentation.

Relevant experience may include:

• LLM and generative AI applications
• Agentic AI and tool-enabled workflows
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
• AI/model and third-party platform integrations
• AI evaluation, monitoring, and observability
• AI-assisted coding, testing, and software development

The right leader understands the unique challenges of AI product development—including rapid experimentation, changing technologies, model variability, evaluation, security, and production reliability—and knows how to introduce appropriate engineering discipline without slowing innovation.

• Proven engineering leadership experience within a SaaS or software product company
• Demonstrated ability to lead engineering while remaining close enough to the technology to influence architecture and technical decisions.
• Track record of improving software delivery speed, release consistency, product quality, and engineering accountability.
• Direct experience launching AI-enabled products or functionality into production.
• Strong knowledge of cloud-based, multi-tenant SaaS architecture, APIs, CI/CD, automated testing, application security, scalability, and production operations.
• Experience leading distributed and/or offshore development teams.
• Ability to recruit, develop, and retain strong engineering talent.
• Strong partnership skills across Product, AI, and executive leadership.
• Practical technical judgment and a bias toward simple, scalable, maintainable solutions.
• Comfort operating in an environment where leaders are expected to both think strategically and execute tactically.

The preferred location is Atlanta and a remote option with team meetings at office as needed.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and are committed to creating an inclusive workplace. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, genetic