VP of Engineering; m​/w​/d). Chicao LilyLifestyle

VP of Engineering

Codal is an award-winning digital consultancy that helps enterprise organizations solve complex problems and accelerate growth through elegant, data-driven digital solutions. Our areas of expertise include application modernization, ecommerce, UX/UI design, product strategy, data analytics, and artificial intelligence. We are the premium development partner for global brands across life sciences, manufacturing, B2B platforms and ecommerce.

At Codal you will collaborate with some of the most innovative organizations in the world and work on technologies that push the boundaries of design and software development. You will also be part of a community that promotes long‑term success, not just for our clients but for each other.

Codal is searching for a VP of Engineering to serve as the senior‑most technical leader in the firm. Reporting directly to the CEO, you will oversee a global engineering organization of 200+ professionals across the US, UK and India.

Your mission is to industrialize Codal's technical delivery, establish our AI engineering standards, and turn engineering into a clear commercial advantage in every sales cycle we run. You will be the technical voice in the room with Fortune 500 CIOs and CTOs, and the operating leader our delivery teams rely on to ship.

Strategic engineering leadership

• Operationalize executive goals into technical reality with a near‑term focus on a standardized AI engineering toolkit and the continued expansion of our global nearshore and offshore delivery model
• Set the multi‑year engineering roadmap in partnership with the CEO, Product leadership and Sales
• Own engineering capacity, billable utilization, gross margin and quality across all hubs, with target utilization benchmarks in the 75 to 85 percent range for senior delivery roles

Commercial and pre‑sales partnership

• Partner with Sales and the CEO on the largest, most complex deals; act as the technical executive sponsor on $2M+ pursuits
• Lead architecture and feasibility conversations directly with client CIOs, CTOs and VPs of Engineering; own the technical narrative in finalist meetings
• Govern our pre‑sales scoping process so that estimates, staffing and delivery models stay accurate as deals get more complex
• Translate complex technical roadmaps into commercial language for non‑technical stakeholders and C‑suite executives

Cloud and AI orchestration

• Act as the executive sponsor for our cloud and data partnerships and own the technical relationships with GCP, AWS, Azure, Databricks, Sanity and our other strategic platforms
• Define how Codal builds with AI at the enterprise level: LLM orchestration, retrieval architectures, evaluation, guardrails, agent frameworks, and the build vs buy decisions that go with them
• Establish a standardized AI engineering toolkit so every team ships modern, AI‑native solutions to clients by default, not by exception
• Stay sharp on emerging methodologies (advanced microservices patterns, composable architectures, edge compute, agentic systems) and decide where Codal places its bets

Organizational design and delivery

• Refine the interaction model between US‑based architects and our UK and India engineering hubs so handoffs are clean and follow‑the‑sun delivery is a real capability, not a slogan
• Build the structures, career ladders and rituals that let Engineering Directors and Leads thrive at scale
• Manage Managers, not just ICs: directly lead a tier of Engineering Directors and Leads, and grow the next layer of technical leadership
• Own engineering hiring strategy in partnership with Talent: roles, ladders, leveling and the bar for senior architects

Quality, security and governance

• Define the Codal Standard for security, scalability, performance and accessibility, and make it real on every project, not just the high‑profile ones
• Implement DORA metrics, SLOs and automated Dev Sec Ops  pipelines so engineering health is visible, measurable and improving quarter over quarter
• Own technical risk across the portfolio: red‑team large engagements, intervene early when delivery signals turn negative
• Lead post‑mortems and engineering reviews with the rigor of a…