Harper is a high-performance distributed application platform. It combines a database, in-memory cache, and real-time message broker to allow users to create enterprise-grade solutions with fewer moving parts, fewer lines of code, and a superior developer experience.
We’re looking for a Vice President of Engineering who can scale and inspire our engineering organization while staying close to the technology. This is a hands-on leadership role: you’ll lead the day-to-day operations of the engineering team, managing people, processes, and execution so the SVP of Engineering can focus on long-term vision and technical creativity.
You’ll be coaching world-class engineers, and making sure Harper’s platform evolves ahead of customer needs. You’ll partner with our founders, product, and GTM teams to deliver technology that changes how people think about databases.
What You’ll Do- Own the operational leadership of the engineering organization, including performance reviews, coaching, and setting clear expectations.
- Build and retain a high-performing engineering team by fostering growth, mentorship, and clear career paths.
- Champion best practices in software development, architecture, testing, and deployment.
- Oversee planning, prioritization, and execution of engineering projects to ensure scalable, secure, and high-quality delivery.
- Partner with product management to align technical execution with business priorities.
- Promote accountability, ownership, and empowerment at all levels of the organization.
- Advocate for technical excellence while balancing speed and innovation.
- Collaborate closely with the SVP to translate strategic technical vision into operational reality.
- 10+ years in software engineering, with at least 5 years leading and scaling teams in high-growth environments.
- Proven experience building distributed, cloud-native, or data-intensive systems.
- Deep technical expertise balanced with strong people leadership — you can talk system design one moment and career development the next.
- Track record of hiring, coaching, and developing top engineering talent.
- A builder’s mindset: comfortable rolling up your sleeves and making pragmatic decisions without losing sight of the big picture.
- Strong communicator who can align engineering with product, design, and business priorities.
- Experience in databases, real-time systems, or edge computing.
- Hands-on contributions to open source projects.
- Background in startup or founder-led environments.
- Experience with Harper.
Salary Range: $225,000 - $250,000
Interview Process:
- 1st Stage: 30 minute Zoom screen with Head of People Operations
- 2nd Stage: 60 minute Zoom conversation with SVP of Internal Strategy
- 3rd Stage: 60 minute Zoom conversation with Hiring Manager - SVP of Engineering, and two senior members of the Engineering team
- 4th Stage: 60 minute Zoom conversation with Senior Director of Product Management, and two members of the team
- 5th Stage: 60 minute Zoom conversation with Harper Co-Founders.
Why Join Us:
- Opportunity to be part of a high-growth startup with a collaborative and supportive team culture.
- Flexible work environment with remote work options and a focus on work-life balance.
- Competitive compensation package including base salary, commission, and benefits.
- Room for career advancement and professional development opportunities.
If you are a motivated self-starter who thrives in a fast-paced environment and shares our values of transparency, authenticity, and empowerment, we want to hear from you!
Top Skills
What We Do
Harper is a globally-distributed edge application platform. It reduces complexity, increases performance, and lowers costs by combining user-defined applications, a high-performance database, and an enterprise-grade streaming broker into a single package. The platform offers unlimited horizontal scale at the click of a button, and synchronizes data across all the nodes in a cluster in milliseconds. Harper simplifies the process of delivering applications and the data that drives them to the edge, which dramatically improves both the user experience and total cost of ownership for large-scale applications. Deploying Harper on global infrastructure enables a CDN-like solution for enterprise data and applications.
Harper is partnered with global companies like Akamai, Verizon, AWS, and Lumen to bring a complete solution to the market. Their customers include massive gaming companies, global retailers, digital advertising innovators, and more.
Harper has over 130K deployments and 15K community members. Their leadership has a deep and diverse background in solving complex tech challenges for organizations from startups up to Fortune 100 companies and beyond. Harper has achieved RedHat certification on OpenShift, and is deployable anywhere, including Linode, DigitalOcean Marketplace, hyper-scaler clouds, and more.
Harper has been awarded Best Small Companies to Work For by BuiltIn, Top Edge Computing Companies to Watch, Startup of the Year by Hackernoon. Within the last year, our CEO has been awarded the Ethical Leader of the Year by the University of Colorado and was recognized as a Titan 100 for the Colorado Titan 100 Awards.
Why Work With Us
Harper is an innovation-motivated company that solves the most complex problems facing technology at scale. Leading with transparency and radical authenticity, employees receive specific and timely feedback driving rapid career growth and a strong sense of ownership. At Harper, we build people up to realize their full potential.
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