The Mandate: Execute at Scale, Lead with Depth

Search Atlas is a Silicon Valley anomaly: we bootstrapped to $32M ARR without a dollar of VC funding. We built systems that crawl millions of pages daily and serve Fortune 500s with 99.99% uptime. Now, we are pioneering Agentic Marketing—AI systems that don’t just analyze data; they act on it autonomously.

We don’t need a spreadsheet jockey. We need a VP of Engineering who possesses the technical rigor of a Staff+ IC and the strategic vision of a Founder. You will own the execution engine that takes us to $100M ARR. You won’t be trapped in conference rooms; you’ll be in the trenches of architecture, reviewing critical-path code, and mentoring the next generation of elite engineers.

Your Arena: Two-Mode Leadership

Mode 1: Technical Gravitas & Architecture (40% High-Leverage Execution)

• Guardian of the Critical Path: You aren't shipping routine tickets, but you own the final architectural blueprint. When our Celery task architecture needs to scale to billions of background jobs, you design the solution.

• Code Review Authority: You set the gold standard. Your presence in PR reviews isn't to micromanage, but to ensure distributed systems anti-patterns and N+1 queries never see the light of production.

• Forensics & Resilience: When the system faces extreme load, you lead the diagnosis. You use Datadog, Sentry, and Grafana as forensic tools to maintain sub-100ms latency across our agentic stack.

Mode 2: Engineering Velocity & Culture (60% Organizational Scaling)

• Elite Operations: Evolve our 100+ engineer organization into a world-class unit. You implement processes that increase velocity by removing friction, not by adding bureaucracy. TDD, CI/CD, and trunk-based development are your religion.

• Leader of Leaders: Mentor Tech Leads and Principal Engineers through action. Your team should grow faster by watching you solve a "hard" problem on a whiteboard than they would in a year of seminars.

• Talent Magnet: Build a culture that the top 1% of SF engineers quit their jobs to join. You know how to identify "operators" and filter out "tourists" within a 15-minute conversation.

The Technical Reality (The Stack You Own)

• Backend: Python 3, Django REST Framework, Celery (Async processing at massive scale).

• Data: PostgreSQL (Transactional optimization), ClickHouse (Analytics), Elasticsearch (Search), Redis.

• Infra: Kubernetes, Docker, Microservices—managing terabytes of data and sub-100ms latency requirements.

• AI/ML: LLM orchestration, agentic systems architecture, and vector databases in production environments.

Who You Are

• The Profile: 10+ years of shipping production code, with 3+ years leading organizations of 50+ engineers. You have the title of a VP but the current, sharp skills of a Staff Engineer.

• Proven Track Record: You’ve successfully scaled SaaS platforms from $20M to $100M+ ARR in capital-efficient environments.

• Shipping Obsession: You measure cycle time, deployment frequency, and MTTR. You hate waste and love aggressive iteration.

• SF-Based: You understand that high-bandwidth leadership happens in person. You thrive in whiteboard wars and rapid, face-to-face iteration.

The Partnership & Compensation

The Package (SF 2026 Executive Standard):

• Base: $200,000 – $425,000+ (Based on technical depth and leadership track record).

• Equity: Meaningful ownership in a profitable, high-growth, bootstrapped rocket ship.

• Benefits: Premium Health/Dental/Vision, Unlimited PTO, Paid Parental Leave.

• The "Edge": Company-paid Lasik (visual clarity for the mission), $500/quarter professional development budget, and a zero-politics environment.

The Culture:

• Ship-or-Die Velocity: We deploy daily. We optimize hourly.

• Ownership Cult: Engineers own features end-to-end. We don't have "project managers" to shield you; we have owners who ship.

• Radical Candor: Direct feedback, brutal honesty, and extremely high expectations.