VP of Engineering

Nuclearn is hiring its first VP of Engineering. The right person gets a rare combination: a real engineering leadership role, founders who are technical and want a peer, and software that runs in places most engineers never get to build for.

Our software runs inside nuclear plants, sometimes on air-gapped on-prem deployments, and the team that builds it has to operate at a level of correctness and reliability that most B2B SaaS engineering orgs never have to think about. Reporting to Brad, our CEO, you'll lead software, platform/SRE, cybersecurity, and QA. You'll partner with Product on the roadmap, with Customer Outcomes on reliability commitments, and with the founders on the AI strategy that defines our next two years.

Most VPs of Engineering haven't shipped into nuclear operations. The motion is unusual:

• Our software runs in air-gapped environments. That changes how you think about deployment, observability, updates, and incident response. Cloud-native instincts will get you partway and then stop working.
• Regulated, safety-adjacent buyers. Cyber, audit trails, SOC 2, and ISO 27001 aren't checkboxes; they're how we earn the right to be in the plant.
• Player-coach is real. If you've been a pure people leader for the last five years, this isn't the role.

If you've spent your career managing managers in a 200-engineer org, this won't be the right fit. If you've led 10 to 30 engineers in a complex domain and you still love the technical work, keep reading.

Brad has been carrying engineering leadership alongside the CEO role, and that's not sustainable as we scale. We're live at 70+ nuclear facilities, our customer count is accelerating, reliability and security are now company-level goals, and the engineering org needs a leader who can hold the standard while Brad steps back into the founder seat.

Engineering leadership and org design. Build the org across backend, frontend, platform/SRE, cybersecurity, and QA. Hire, coach, and set the growth paths. Define interfaces and ownership that mirror the architecture.

Software delivery and reliability. Own SDLC, release management, and the customer-visible reliability metrics that follow from them. Drive Sentry triage, SLOs, and the discipline (typed APIs, idempotent jobs, safe rollbacks) that keeps a regulated customer base trusting us.

AI-native engineering culture. Embed AI throughout the toolchain (test generation, code review, log triage, postmortem drafting) and model how the team builds AI products themselves: evals, guardrails, human-in-the-loop, trust metrics that move.

Cybersecurity and compliance. Make secure SDLC, SOC 2, and ISO 27001 something the org executes without friction. Partner with leadership on deployment hardening, vendor reviews, and enterprise security questionnaires.

Quality and validation. Stand up the QMS the regulated context demands: test plans, change control, release sign-offs, audit evidence. Lightweight enough to ship, rigorous enough to defend.

• Meet every engineer, understand the org's strengths and gaps, and publish a hiring and structure plan
• Cut a meaningful class of Sentry noise via idempotency, DLQs, and AI-assisted triage
• Stand up the QMS skeleton ahead of upcoming SOC 2 and ISO 27001 work

You've led 10 to 30 engineers across multiple disciplines at a startup serving regulated enterprises. You've shipped AI-powered features into production and know how to measure whether they're actually trusted. You've owned reliability for a customer base that couldn't tolerate the kind of outage most SaaS companies shrug off.

You're a player-coach by preference. You'll dive into FastAPI, React, Postgres, and Celery on Monday, run an architecture review on Tuesday, and sit in a customer incident on Wednesday. You can also sit in a room with a nuclear engineer or a plant CIO and negotiate a pragmatic path forward without overselling.

You care about correctness. Typed contracts, migrations with backfills, idempotent jobs, V&V that catches the sharp edges. You've seen what happens when teams skip this work and you don't want to ship that way.

You're an AI-fluent professional. You use AI tools in your work, you've shipped AI features, and you can think alongside the founders about where this technology is going and what we should build next.

You're comfortable with candor. You'll tell the founders when a roadmap commitment isn't realistic. You'll tell an engineer when their design isn't ready. You'll tell a customer when a deadline is at risk. We say the hard things here, with facts and without spin.

• Background in nuclear, utilities, defense, aerospace, or another safety-critical domain
• SOC 2 or ISO 27001 experience as an engineering leader
• Experience scaling engineering from founder-led to function-led

We try to be honest about where people thrive here, because that saves everyone time. Some patterns we've seen:

• You're comfortable building without a playbook. A lot of what you'll do here, you'll figure out as you go. We're past product-market fit, but we're still building most of the systems around it.
• You're energized by fast cadence. The work moves fast. Customers are growing. Priorities shift. People who do well here lean into that pace rather than waiting for it to settle.
• You bring decisions, not just questions. Our managers expect you to come with "Here's what I'm going to do, unless you tell me otherwise," not "What should I do?"
• You want candid feedback. We tell each other the hard things, with facts and without spin. People who do well here find this energizing, not uncomfortable.
• You like reaching across function lines. Small team means everyone wears multiple hats. The boundary of your role is whatever the work needs, and that's a feature, not a bug.

Delivery is predictable. Reliability metrics are public, accurate, and trending in the right direction. SOC 2 and ISO 27001 land on time without heroics. Brad is spending his time on the company, not on the engineering org.

Our founders are nuclear engineers from Palo Verde who built Nuclearn to bring AI to an industry that needed it, and to do it in a way that actually makes operations better, safer, and smarter. Our team now has 50+ years of combined nuclear experience between them, and engineering's job is to make that expertise show up in software that works.

We're a values-driven company. Six values shape how we work, and three will be especially visible in this role:

Candor. Say the hard thing, facts only, no spin. Engineering leadership without candor produces optimistic roadmaps and brittle systems.

Ownership and Urgency. See it, own it, fix it. You'll set the bar for how the org responds when something breaks at a customer site.

Excellence through Iteration. Move quickly, never carelessly. Regulated software demands both.

You'll be in our Phoenix HQ four days a week (Wednesdays remote) with Brad, the founders, and the team you're leading.

• Full-time, salaried, with equity participation and bonus
• Hybrid in our Phoenix HQ (≥80% in-office, Wednesdays remote)
• Occasional travel to customer sites and audits
• U.S. citizenship or permanent residency required for DOE export compliance

Fast, respectful, and practical. Our goal is first conversation to decision in three weeks or less.

1. 20-minute intro with Brad to trade context and assess mutual fit
2. Leadership and systems deep dive: org design, SDLC and reliability, security and QA strategy
3. Team panel and working session: a real architecture review, incident retrospective, or design exercise
4. Final conversation with the founders on the 90-day plan and how you'll measure success

Nuclear is an industry that has historically drawn from a narrow talent pool, and we think widening that aperture is part of how the industry moves forward. Nuclearn hires the best person for each role regardless of background, and we mean that as a practical commitment, not a legal line. Research shows that women, people of color, and candidates from non-traditional backgrounds are less likely to apply for roles unless they meet 100% of the qualifications. If you can do the work and the role excites you, apply. Even if your path here doesn't look like the one we described, the best hires we've made often surprised us.

We don't discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.