Vice President, Engineering

About the role

The Pioneering Intelligence team at Flagship Pioneering builds the digital and AI foundation that accelerates the creation and growth of our companies. We are seeking a Vice President of Engineering to lead a medium sized team of Principal Software Engineers, each operating as the technical authority for their own product area. This is a non-traditional engineering leadership role. Rather than managing a layered organization, you will build and support a team composed entirely of senior individual contributors operating as technical leads at the highest level. Each engineer owns end-to-end technical decisions, builds hands-on, and engages directly with scientific users. Your job is not to manage their work but to set the conditions in which exceptional engineers do their best work, remove obstacles, raise the collective bar, and translate technical strategy into organizational direction. You remain technically active. You will contribute to architectural decisions, review complex system designs, and stay close enough to the work to lead credibly. You spend roughly 25% of your time in hands-on technical work. The rest is spent on strategy, people, and organizational leadership: building the team, aligning with product leadership, representing the function to senior stakeholders, and driving the conditions for fast, high-quality delivery across the portfolio. The model is intentionally fluid. Principal Engineers on this team may move between pure IC work and the formal coordination of other resources as project needs evolve, including the management of fully embedded software engineering contractors. It is the VP who balances resources across all teams and projects, in close collaboration with product and strategy leads, ensuring the right people are working on the right things at the right time. You will work in close partnership with product and strategy leads and alongside a team of peers who expect the same rigor and accountability from you that you expect from them.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a team of approximately five Principal Software Engineers, each owning technical authority for their own product area
• Set technical strategy and architectural direction for the AI and digital platform, making or ratifying the most consequential build-vs-buy and system design decisions
• Stay technically active: contribute to architectural reviews, design complex systems, and maintain the credibility to lead a team of principal-level engineers
• Build and maintain the team itself: hire exceptional engineers, develop their careers, and create a culture where the floor is principal-level performance
• Represent engineering to product leadership, senior stakeholders, and across the Flagship ecosystem, translating technical direction into business impact
• Balance resources across all teams and projects in close collaboration with product and strategy leads, including decisions about when Principal Engineers take on formal coordination of embedded SWE contractors versus pure IC work
• Drive delivery across the portfolio by removing blockers, resolving cross-team dependencies, and ensuring the team ships with speed and quality
• Model and advance an AI-native engineering culture, including the use of tools like Claude Code as organizational force multipliers
• Professional Experience and Qualifications
• Experiences
• Has led a team of senior individual contributors or principal-level engineers, ideally in a lean, high-velocity organization where the team was small and the scope was large
• Has served as the technical authority on a complex, production-grade system, not as a manager who delegates the hard parts, but as an engineer who owned them
• Has built and scaled engineering organizations in ambiguous, fast-moving environments, ideally at a startup or within a high-autonomy team inside a larger organization
• Has worked closely with scientific or domain-expert users and understands how to build products that serve researchers, not just operators
• Has hired and developed principal or staff-level engineers, with a track record of raising the technical bar of a team over time

Requirements

• Technically credible at the system design level: can evaluate architectural decisions, identify risk in complex designs, and contribute meaningfully to the hardest engineering conversations
• Leads through clarity: sets direction, makes decisions, and communicates tradeoffs without requiri

Benefits

Additional Information

About Pioneering Intelligence Pioneering Intelligence builds on Flagship Pioneering's legacy of founding cutting-edge science and computational ventures, harnessing recent advances in AI, machine learning, and data to accelerate fundamental research and create a portfolio of AI-first companies. As part of Flagship's integrated model of science, entrepreneurship, and capital, it transforms breakthrough ideas into world-changing companies, elevating the AI advances happening across the ecosystem in human health, sustainability, and beyond.

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