VP, Engineering

Little more about the team:

AI is changing how software gets built, shipped, and run. It is increasing the need for sense-making of production software systems. We believe AI will reshape observability itself. Honeycomb created this category, and we want our next engineering leader to help us lead its reinvention. 

The role

You’ll join the executive team as a full partner in setting strategy. Our exec team acts as a first team, working closely together to revise our strategy as the world changes. Right now, it is changing often! You’ll bring a wealth of experience and an imagination of what’s possible, help sharpen our bets, and decide with your peers the most elegant way forward. Then you’ll shape a strong engineering org to deliver on these decisions.

What you’ll do

• Shape the strategy. Form your own view of where the product, technology and market are heading. Bring it to your closest partners: product and the CEO, and to the wider exec team. Some of our bets will need sharpening, and some new ones will need making. 
• Build alignment at the top. We believe our strength as a company depends on the strength of our exec team. We want you to make our exec team better, and for your first team to be the exec team. You’ll work closely with product and the CEO, challenging and being challenged in return, until the team is truly committed to a shared direction.
• Help the whole org to make sense of fast change. When the ground moves quickly, people need help understanding what is changing and why. Burnout is high in our industry, and we want to keep our people motivated, excited to come to work, and with their full creativity and energy. You’ll explain engineering’s direction clearly and repeatedly, to engineers, managers, the exec team, and the rest of the company. We’re remote-first, so much of this happens in writing and in presentations.
• Lead a high-performing team into what’s next. We have strong managers, directors, and ICs. You’ll aim that talent at our biggest opportunities and adjust the org’s structure, goals, and ways of working to be continually more effective. You’ll do this without losing what makes the team great. 
• Lead from technical credibility. You can’t lead an AI era shift without a deep understanding of the ergonomics of the landslide of change underway.

You might be a fit if

• You’ve led engineering through large scale changes in direction, not just growth.
• You’ve shipped software with AI tools yourself within the last 12 months.
• You have a special talent for collaboration and improving executive teams.
• You’re as interested in shaping strategy as in executing it.
• You’ve worked at a larger company, and know what breaks as companies scale. But have a risk tolerance of someone from an early stage startup.
• You’re comfortable with uncertainty, rapid change, and shaping new bets towards product-market fit.
• You’ve led distributed teams and communicate well in writing and in person.
• You care about developer tools and have good taste in them. (Having used Honeycomb is a bonus, not a requirement)
• You share our values.

Worth reading: How we do business at Honeycomb in the AI era, our AI norms and values, and why engineering is all in on AI. 

If you match some of this but not all of it, please apply anyway. We’d rather talk to a strong candidate who doubts themselves than miss them.