Remote VP of Engineering - Data & AI

Who is Sonar?

Sonar helps prevent code quality and code security issues from reaching production, amplifies developers' productivity in concert with AI assistants, and improves the developer experience with streamlined workflows. Sonar analyzes all code, regardless of who writes it — your internal team, genAI, or third parties — resulting in more secure, reliable, and maintainable applications. Rooted in the open source community, Sonar’s solutions support over 30 programming languages, frameworks, and infrastructure technologies. Today, Sonar is used by +7M developers and 400K organizations worldwide, including the DoD, Microsoft, NASA, MasterCard, Siemens, and T-Mobile.

We believe in developing great products that are supported by great internal teams and a strong culture. We are highly committed to and obsessed with the company, users, each other, and our open source community. We have high standards and hold each other accountable for acting with positivity, dedication, thoughtfulness, empathy, and passion daily. 

We are deliberate with our decisions with high clarity of intention. At the same time, we feel extreme urgency and move forward quickly. 

And lastly, we are highly effective and operationally efficient . We operate collectively as One Team to accomplish our goals.

At Sonar, CODE is more than just an acronym – it's a mindset that defines daily operations. 

Why You Should Apply: 

At Sonar, we’re a group of brilliant, motivated, and driven professionals working hard to help supercharge developers to build better, faster. Sonar helps to continuously improve code quality and code security while reducing developer toil. This means that developers can focus on doing more of what they love and less of what they don’t. Our solutions don’t just solve symptoms of problems – we help fix issues at the source – for all code, whether it's developer-written, AI-generated, or from third parties.

We have a dynamic culture with employees worldwide and hub offices in the USA, Switzerland, the UK, Singapore, and Germany. Team members should be able to come to work every day, work on a product they are proud of, love what they do, and feel energized by their peers. With our roots deep in the open source community, we’re all about the mission: supercharge developers to build better, faster.

The Impact You Will Have:  

As the Vice President of Data & AI, you will be the transformative force that turns our data into a strategic enterprise asset. Your vision will directly shape our competitive edge by fostering a data-first culture, driving the development of advanced AI and machine learning models to unlock new revenue streams, and dramatically improving operational efficiency. You will build and mentor a world-class team of data professionals, establishing the foundational data infrastructure and governance that empowers the entire organization to make smarter, faster, and more impactful decisions. Your leadership will be pivotal in defining not just our data strategy, but the future of our business.

What You Will Do Daily:

• Spearhead the company's entire Data & AI organization - encompassing data engineering, data science, machine learning, and analytics - to deliver transformative data products and AI-powered capabilities that drive business value.
• Define and champion the company's comprehensive Data & AI strategy, establishing a clear vision for how data science, analytics, and machine learning will create a sustainable competitive advantage.
• Own the architecture and roadmap for the company’s enterprise data platform, machine learning infrastructure (MLOps), and analytics ecosystem, ensuring robust scalability, reliability, and data integrity.
• Serve as the executive data partner to the entire organization, collaborating with Product to embed AI into the user experience and with business leaders to foster a data-driven culture through actionable insights.
• Establish and enforce a rigorous data governance framework, ensuring data quality, privacy, security, and compliance across the entire data lifecycle.
• Implement and champion best practices in DataOps and MLOps to increase the velocity and reliability of data pipelines and model deployment. Foster a culture of rigorous experimentation and responsible AI development.
• Build and scale a world-class organization of Data Scientists, ML Engineers, Data Engineers, and Analysts. Own the talent strategy for all data functions, from recruitment and retention to defining specialized career paths.
• Mentor and develop a senior leadership team across the data and AI functions, building the technical and strategic capabilities required to solve the company's most complex challenges.

The Experience You Will Need:

• 15+ years of progressive experience in the engineering domain, with at least 8+ years in an international leadership capacity managing high-performing data engineering, data science, and/or machine learning teams.
• A proven track record of delivering large-scale data platforms and productionized ML models that have resulted in significant, measurable business impacts (e.g., revenue growth, cost savings, enhanced user engagement).
• Deep technical expertise in the modern data and AI ecosystem, including cloud data platforms (e.g., Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery), MLOps principles, ML frameworks (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch), and data orchestration technologies.
• Exceptional communication and influencing skills, with the ability to articulate a compelling vision for data and AI and translate complex technical concepts into business value for an executive audience (C-suite, Board of Directors).
• Visionary leadership skills with the proven ability to recruit, mentor, and inspire a multi-disciplinary team of world-class data scientists, engineers, and analysts, fostering a culture of innovation, collaboration, and intellectual curiosity.
• Expertise in establishing robust Data Governance and applying modern operational frameworks (DataOps, MLOps) to ensure data quality, compliance, and rapid, reliable delivery of data products and models.

Why You Will Love It Here:

• Our culture and mission set us apart. We have a dynamic work culture that values respect and kindness and embraces the right to fail (and get right back up again!). 
• Great people make a great company. We value people skills as much as technical skills and strive to keep things friendly while still being passionate leaders in our domains. 
• We have a flexible work policy that includes 3 days in-office and 2 days work-from-home each week for those located near our office locations; some locations such as Dubai, India, Japan and Australia operate fully remotely.
• We have a growth mindset. We love learning and believe continuous education is critical to our success. In an ever-changing industry, new skills are necessary, and we're happy to help our team acquire them.
• As the leader in our field, our products and services are as strong as our internal team members.
• We embrace transparency with regular meetings, cascading messages and updates on the growth and success of our organization.

Benefits of Working With Sonar:

• We encourage usage of our robust time-off allocations with 27 PTO days for our employees based out of the Geneva region, plus additional days based on seniority and circumstances.
• We contribute 60% of the total cost for your pension; 13.5% to 15.5% of your base salary for savings; 2% for risk.
• Generous discretionary Company Growth Bonus, paid annually.
• Commuting:Sustainable mobility options, including carpooling and the refund of 60% of the annual transportation subscription.
• Global workforce with employees in 20+ countries representing 35+ unique nationalities.
• We have an annual kick-off somewhere in the world where we meet to build relationships and goals for the company.

We Value Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion:

At Sonar, we believe that our diversity is our strength. We are a global company that values and respects different backgrounds, perspectives, and cultures.

We are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive work environment where everyone feels valued and empowered to contribute their best. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer and welcome all qualified applicants, regardless of race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.

All offers of employment at Sonar are contingent upon the precise results of a comprehensive background check and reference verification conducted before the start date.

Applications that are submitted through agencies or third party recruiters will not be considered.