Senior VP of Engineering (SVPE)

Gorgias is the conversational AI platform for ecommerce that drives sales and resolves support inquiries. Trusted by over 15,000 ecommerce brands, Gorgias supports growing independent shops to globally recognizable brands.

Built for Shopify and powered by advanced ecommerce integrations, Gorgias's conversational AI understands your brand, tools, policies, and customers to drive personalized, 1-to-1 conversations — from editing orders and initiating returns to making product recommendations. Gorgias, where every customer interaction feels personal, support becomes sales, and conversations shape success.

TL;DR: Ecommerce merchants spend $2b per year on their support team. Gorgias is building a Conversational AI that drives sales and automates CX for merchants. We’re currently at $70m in ARR and the goal is to get to $200m by 2027. What's in it for you? Take a company to IPO while being a member of the exec team and owning the whole engineering team. We're at 100 engineers today, we're growing the team 50% next year and the goal is to aim for 250m ARR in 4 yrs.

We’re building a conversational AI that drives sales and automates CX for merchants

We are uniquely positioned to lead the development of Conversational AI. As a customer service company operating in the transactional space of ecommerce, our goal is to build an AI that not only automates support but also drives sales and streamlines internal tasks for merchants.

Today, we empower merchants to succeed and grow by offering a conversational AI that automates CX requests and boosts sales across all channels. We’ve built the #1 helpdesk for Shopify, with an AI that automates customer experience (CX). Over 15,000 brands, including Timbuk2, Steve Madden, and Mr. Beast, rely on us daily. Read customer stories here.

We believe in empowering entrepreneurs to push commerce forward. By supporting commerce, we’re contributing to an industry that employs the most people globally and sustains millions of jobs.

Our mission is to serve all merchants—whether online or in the physical world, and across every geography. For now, we’re focusing on ecommerce merchants on Shopify, particularly those generating between $1M and $1B in Gross Merchandise Value. We bring all customer conversations into one place, leveraging their unique data to automate tier-1 support and free up teams to focus on driving revenue and building customer loyalty.

Customer experience is at the heart of everything we do. Today, this means focusing primarily on support, but we are also expanding our efforts to include product discovery and sales.

For our engineering team, success means empowering merchants to deliver exceptional customer experiences through a stable, fast platform that leverages AI to automate conversations, reduce support costs, and drive revenue for brands. We’re seeking an SVP of Engineering to lead this function—someone passionate about building innovative products, customer-obsessed, skilled at solving technical challenges, and eager to own business outcomes as we evolve into a multi-product company.

TAM: $4b
-Helpdesk: $140m
-Automate: $860m
-AI Shopping assistant: $4b

ARR: $70m
-ARR YoY Growth: 33%

Funding: $101m
-March 2024: $29 million in Series C-2 funding from existing investors (SaaStr and Alven), with participation from Amplify, Horsley Bridge, Shopify, Sapphire, CRV and Transpose.
-August 2022: $30m in Series C-1 from Shopify and Transpose
-December 2020: $25m in Series B from Sapphire, Alven, CRV, Greycroft, FJ labs
-November 2019: $14m in Series A from Amplify, Alven, CRV, SaaStr

What’s the opportunity for you?

• High impact role as the #1 engineering leader reporting into a founding CEO, trusted with instilling best practices, influencing business strategy and the technical roadmap.

• Lead an ambitious engineering team and leverage your network to attract top talent as you scale the org. Complex technical challenges include:

  • Going multi-product. Specifically their new Marketing Suite with an AI Agent that knows how to sell and increases the GMV for their merchants.

  • Building a conversational AI at scale, with 1.6 million automated customer conversations per month

  • Going upmarket. Requires building some enterprise specific features such as better reporting, skills based routing and higher reliability guarantees.

• We’re backed by top minds in the industry (e.g. Jason Lemkin, Shopify Executives, etc.), and in a space that’s open to disruption: customer support is one of the first real world AI application and the industry is rapidly changing towards being highly automated.

Your mission over 18 months: scale our conversational AI platform for ecommerce

• Scale the Engineering Team and Processes to support 2 product lines: AI support agent and AI sales agent.

  • Coach or hire leaders to support our vision.

    • A director of engineering for their Support Suite product (core product)

    • Senior Staff Engineering and Director of Engineering for Support Suite.

  • Launch a second product, AI Sales agent, in GA and reach $5m ARR.

  • Get our AI Support agent to automate 3m customer interactions a month

• Build the best CRM platform in the space to support conversational can be on point when speaking with customers

  • Level up data infrastructure especially around data storage (databases) and data streaming, crucial. To build the best AI, you need the best data.

• Empower us to move upmarket

  • Improve reliability and stability of our platform

  • Improve developer experience to maximize engineering velocity
    

Your role: Senior VP of Engineering Scope, all engineering functions, 100 people

Team: 100 people, 7 direct reports

• Victor Duprez (Head of Eng, ConvAI)

• Jason Diller (VPE of CRM)

• Sebastian Caceres (Sr. engineer, SRE)

• Alexander Prikhodko (EM, Phone)

• Maciej Łopaciński (Sr. EM, Data & Analytics)

• Yegor Yakovishen (Sr. EM, Agent Experience & Productivity)

• Bogdan Tănase (EM, Convert)
  

What are we looking for? Your profile:

Characteristics

• Experience hitting revenue goals across several product lines, by motivating a team of 150+ engineers towards a shared vision

• Track record of improving velocity in engineering while also reducing technical debt.

• Track record of bringing in engineering leaders and very senior ICs into a team that executed complex high traffic projects.

• Can participate actively in low level technical discussions and make decisions without a lot of external help from senior ICs. Was a senior/staff engineer in the past with a significant technical achievement that decided to take the manager route later.

• Experience with complex data streaming systems at a scale that’s bigger than what Gorgias has today. Marketing experience is a big bonus. SaaS is the most relevant.

You believe in our principles

• Maximize stakeholder value

• Empower other teams to make the right decisions
  

We want to reach IPO scale in 3 yrsOpportunity: commerce accounts for ˜20% of the global GDP and SaaS for commerce is growing 20% YoY. We’ll get to $1b ARR by becoming the CRM for commerce.

• Salesforce makes $30b ARR being the CRM for all businesses. We think we can get to $1b ARR (and beyond) being the CRM for Commerce. They have a suite of tools, the largest one being support. We’re going to build the ecom suite.

  Source

• The ecommerce SaaS TAM is growing 20% YoY

  https://investors.bigcommerce.com/static-files/d620947e-8d23-4a88-a6a9-60bcb2ec608c

The future is Conversational AI for Enterprise: we’ll get to $200m ARR by 2027 by going upmarket and stepping into Marketing

We’ll do this in 3 steps:

• Automate CX for Enterprise

• Building Conversational AI to sell

• Sell the whole Conversational AI to Enterprise

Shopify is only ˜1/3 of the overall ecommerce TAM. And the market is growing 20% YoY (2x every 4 years)

We’ll get to $70m ARR this year by automating 30% of support for merchants
Compensation
335-400k total cash + 0.79-1% equity (based on profile)
Location
This position is based in New York City, Toronto, or Paris.
We come to the office on Wed+Thu.

Diversity & Inclusion at Gorgias
We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. At Gorgias, we believe that diverse teams drive innovation and better decision-making. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, age, or any other protected status.
If you need accommodations to participate in the application or interview process, perform essential job functions, or access other employment benefits, please contact us at [email protected]. Let’s grow together!