VP of Engineering

We’re building Roebling, an AI-native industrial planning platform aimed at enabling the rapid development of the industrial infrastructure required to power and manufacture cutting edge technologies. Today, innovators face an outdated reality: getting to construction on projects big and small requires thousands of hours of repetitive, PDF- and spreadsheet-driven workflows with heavy QA/QC overhead. It’s inefficient, slow, and largely unchanged for more than a century. Over the past 18 months, we’ve built an MVP to demonstrate how reducing planning timelines by 10x helps companies bring new products to market faster.

We’re not building another OpenAI wrapper – the foundation of Roebling’s backend is a no-code project simulation engine that combines aspects of chemical engineering, finance, and operations with AI-enabled workflows to inform infrastructure investment decisions for industrial projects with construction budgets from $10s to $100s of millions. If you're motivated by using software and AI to unlock physical infrastructure, we’d love to chat!

As our VP of Engineering, you will be responsible for leading engineering execution, establishing technical excellence, and scaling the team as we evolve from MVP to a robust, production-ready platform. You’ll collaborate closely with our CEO, CTO, and senior technical leaders to define architecture, drive delivery, and shape our product roadmap.

This role is ideal for someone who thrives when taking ideas from 0 to 1, enjoys guiding engineering strategy while still diving into the codebase when needed, and has experience building scalable systems and high-performing teams in early-stage startups.

Example projects you might work on:

• Defining the long-term architecture of Roebling’s simulation platform, including decisions around compute infrastructure, caching strategies, multitenancy, and scalability as customer project sizes grow

• Architect our AI-assisted workflow system, including prompt strategy, model evaluation pipelines, fine-tuning, agentic workflows, and integration with deterministic engineering logic

• Set engineering-wide practices for reliability, observability, and performance (CI/CD, automated regression suites, simulation benchmarking, runtime monitoring, etc.)

Must-have

• Strong proficiency in Python and Typescript/React

• Experience architecting and scaling compute-heavy systems

• Demonstrated experience shipping products in an early-stage startup environment

• Ability to lead teams through ambiguity and make high-quality technical decisions

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills

• High level of ownership and a bias toward action

• Authorization to work in the United States

Nice-to-have

• Familiarity with other science and engineering disciplines (e.g., biology, physics, chemistry)

• Experience in the specific frameworks we use: React, Next.js, Redux, TailwindCSS (frontend); FastAPI, Postgres, Supabase (backend)

• Degree in Computer Science or a related field preferred

While fully-remote, our team highly values in-person collaboration. We have a preference for candidates near our existing team (NYC, SF/Bay Area, Boston) who are open to hybrid work.

Salary range: $180-250k, based on experience

Our team aspires to hire great people and create an environment where we can be happy, feel challenged, and do our best work. It's an exciting time to join Synonym and build that environment from the ground up!

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage

• Daily lunch allowance

• Beautiful office in SoHo (NYC), or coworking space (Boston, SF Bay Area)

• Competitive compensation packages, including equity

• Flexible PTO

• 401(k) 

• Team offsites

Synonym provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. We are committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce and welcome people from all backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and abilities.