VP of Engineering (CTO)

This is a remote position. ABOUT US BevGenie is the Enterprise Intelligence platform purpose-built for the Beverage Alcohol industry. We turn complex market, consumer, and competitive signals into decisions that brand owners, distributors, and retailers can act on immediately. We are an early-stage, high-velocity startup operating at the intersection of AI and an industry that has never been disrupted — and we intend to change that. THE ROLE We are looking for a founding CTO who can do two things simultaneously: ship production-grade software and establish the engineering culture, process, and tool chain for a team where every person — from day one — works with state-of-the-art AI coding agents as their primary development environment. This is not a role for someone who is curious about AI-assisted engineering. It is for someone who has already lived it, broken things with it, and built a disciplined practice around it. WHAT YOU'LL OWN • Design and own the technical architecture of BevGenie — data ingestion, AI/ML pipelines, APIs, and front-end — with a relentless focus on reliability, security, and scale. • Define and continuously evolve an AI-native engineering process: where AI agents accelerate output, where human judgment is mandatory, and how the team maintains quality across both. • Recruit, mentor, and lead a small, high-leverage engineering team; cultivate a culture where staying current with AI tooling is a professional expectation, not a nice-to-have. • Own the infrastructure strategy across cloud, data, and security — making deliberate decisions about build vs. buy, technical debt, and compliance requirements in regulated industry verticals. • Serve as a technical voice with customers, partners, and investors; translate complex capabilities into credible, differentiated product narratives. • Keep the organization informed about the rapidly advancing AI development landscape and make evidence-based decisions about when and how to adopt new capabilities. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR • Demonstrated hands-on experience building and shipping production systems using AI coding agents (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot Workspace) as a core workflow — not as a productivity shortcut, but as a primary engineering methodology. • Strong full-stack and platform engineering fundamentals: you can reason about data models, API design, distributed systems, and observability independent of the tools used to build them. • Experience building intelligence or analytics products where data quality, lineage, and trust are as hard as the engineering itself. • A concrete, opinionated point of view on how to govern AI-generated code: review practices, testing strategies, deployment gates, and observability instrumentation that keep velocity high without accumulating hidden risk. • Track record of leading small engineering teams through ambiguity — comfortable making rapid, reversible decisions and distinguishing them from decisions that require more deliberation. • Excellent communication skills; able to explain technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders and translate product requirements into engineering priorities without losing fidelity in either direction. WHY THIS ROLE The honest version: this is a hard job. The industry is complex, the AI tooling landscape is moving fast, and we are building in a space where trust and data credibility matter enormously. The compelling version: you will have a genuine opportunity to define what AI-native software development looks like at a real company serving a real industry — before anyone else has figured it out. You will have the full support of a leadership team that has already committed to top-of-the-line hardware and AI tooling for every engineer, and the autonomy to set the technical direction from the ground up.