VP of Engineering

VP of Engineering

Why Nuclearn.ai

Nuclearn.ai builds AI‑powered software for the nuclear and utility industries—tools that keep critical infrastructure reliable, efficient, and safe. Our platform integrates AI‑driven workflow, documentation, and research automation and is already used at 60+ nuclear reactors across North America
. We’re now looking for a hands‑on, systems‑minded VP of Engineering to turn that momentum into disciplined, reliable delivery across software, hardware/infrastructure, cybersecurity, and quality
.

You’ll own the engineering strategy end‑to‑end, shape the org, raise the bar on reliability and security, and ship features and integrations that matter to real plants.

U.S. citizenship or permanent residency (green card) is required due to DOE export compliance.

You’ll report to the founders and lead a multi‑discipline organization spanning Software
, Hardware/Infrastructure
, Cybersecurity
, and Quality Assurance (QA/V&V). You’ll define the engineering strategy, hire and coach leaders, establish world‑class practices, and deliver production‑grade AI in a regulated, customer‑integrated environment. This is a working VP role where you’ll set architecture, get into the weeds on incidents and design reviews, and model how we blend modern software engineering with production‑grade AI and secure deployments.

• Design the org across backend, frontend, platform/SRE, hardware/infra, cybersecurity, and QA
  ; define interfaces and ownership boundaries that mirror the architecture.
• Hire, onboard, and coach ICs and managers; set clear growth paths, performance expectations, and succession plans.
• Run the rooms: weekly planning, architecture/design sessions, AI+UX charrettes, post‑incident RCAs, incident drills, and cross‑team release reviews.
• Build an AI‑enabled engineering culture—safe and effective use of AI pair programming, code generation, test synthesis, and design assistance.

• Be hands‑on in the codebase, especially early on - contributing directly to critical features, reviews, and infrastructure while building and mentoring the team.
• Own SDLC and release management (branching, feature flags, safe rollbacks) across services and clients.
• Institute typed APIs and schema‑migration discipline (backfills, idempotency, partitioning).
• Drive Sentry triage and error‑budget/SLOs; implement retries, back‑pressure, DLQs, and circuit breakers.
• Embed AI in the toolchain: automated test generation, static‑analysis + AI code review prompts, release‑note drafting, log summarization, and postmortem drafting.
• Define and publish customer‑visible reliability metrics (uptime, success rates, SLA adherence).

• Own the strategy for edge/on‑prem and cloud/hybrid deployments common in utility environments (including constrained/air‑gapped scenarios).
• Lead build‑vs‑buy for edge connectors/appliances and plant‑side integrations; oversee vendor selection, BOMs, lifecycle management, and spares.
• Establish infrastructure standards: high‑availability topologies, disaster recovery, backup/restore, configuration management, and environment parity.
• Ensure robust networking patterns for utility/OT integration (segmentation, least privilege, managed ingress/egress, secure update channels).
• Introduce telemetry for fleet health (hardware status, throughput, queue depth) and capacity planning.

• Embed secure SDLC and change control that satisfy SOC 2/ISO 27001 without slowing delivery; partner with leadership on roadmap‑aligned controls.
• Define deployment hardening for customer sites (key management, identity/SSO, network trust boundaries, audit trails, least‑privilege access).
• Support vendor risk reviews, DPAs in MSAs, and enterprise security questionnaires.

• Build a lightweight but rigorous QMS for software and hardware/edge artifacts: test plans, change control, and release sign‑offs.
• Expand automated test coverage (unit, contract, integration, E2E) and non‑functional testing (load, resilience, failover).
• Define quality metrics: defect escape rate,…