VP of Engineering

VP Of Engineering

Yourgi is on a mission to become Earth's most trusted pet care connector, connecting pet parents with a reliable local network of certified professionals, pet resorts, and veterinary centers. Backed by a passionate team, our mission is to make pet care simple, accessible, and joyful for all. Because pets aren't just animals—they're family.

Yourgi is on a mission to become Earth's most trusted pet care connector. We connect pet parents with a reliable network of care, from independent local pros to full-service pet resorts and veterinary centers, and we design every step to be simple, accessible, and trustworthy. Because pets aren't just animals, they're family. We connect pet parents to two kinds of supply. On our marketplace, we match them with independent service pros for grooming, boarding, training, and daycare, and those pros run their business on Yourgi Pro. Through Yourgi Connect, we link pet parents directly into brick-and-mortar centers, including Destination Pet, Four Walls, and a growing national network, where they can check live availability, reserve a spot, and book in real time. Yourgi Connect is a true 0-to-1 opportunity: a new product that turns a national network of physical centers into online, bookable inventory, and this role helps shape how it gets built from the ground up. We run on web and native iOS and Android apps, for pet parents on one side and the pros and centers who serve them on the other. We're live in five markets and adding more. The next chapter is scaling how we build it. We're looking for a VP of Engineering to lead our engineering organization: roughly 30 engineers building our consumer app, provider tools, matching and booking systems, and marketplace surfaces. You'll report to the Chief Product & Technology Officer with full accountability for how engineering is structured, ships, and grows. This is a build-and-scale role. Yourgi Connect is a 0-to-1 product that turns a national network of physical centers into online, bookable inventory, and it needs engineering leadership that can take it from first markets to national scale. The marketplace keeps growing alongside it, and the organization has to grow with both: teams that own a customer journey end to end, AI-assisted development as the default, and quality built in from the start. You'll set the operating rhythm, build and coach a management bench, and design the org as it scales. You'll have direct authority over org design and executive support to invest.

LOCATION: Remote (US-based. Must work during regular US business hours and participate in remote standups and recurring meetings via Teams)

REPORTS TO: Yourgi Chief Product and Technology Officer

PAY: $250,000 - $275,000/ Salary + Bonus

CORE RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Own how teams are shaped and how work flows, so each team owns a customer journey end to end and can ship without waiting on the others.
• Build technical leadership depth. Name owners for cross-cutting decisions, document the engineering strategy, and grow leads who run their teams independently.
• Make AI-assisted development the default: AI in the standard workflow from spec to code to review, with automated test generation and evals wired into continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD). Track the impact at the team level: cycle time and throughput against a pre-adoption baseline.
• Set the standards and review practices that keep the codebase coherent and secure as AI raises code volume.
• Build a culture where engineers own quality end to end, with automated testing and CI/CD carrying the load.
• Make engineering health measurable: bug frequency, change-failure rate, on-call load, uptime, and time-to-merge, tracked quarter over quarter so the org can see its own trend.
• Own the technical plan for Yourgi Connect: real-time availability, reservation, and booking against a national network of physical centers, built so adding a market doesn't mean rebuilding.
• Turn shared backend capability into platform services the product teams consume, so each new surface launches faster than the last.
• Own the operating cadence and release train (continuous deployment, feature flags, a rotating release captain, on-call) that lets teams ship independently, and put the DORA delivery metrics (deploy frequency, lead time, change-failure rate, time to restore) in front of leadership.
• Partner with Product so engineering leads co-own acceptance criteria and own the technical breakdown.
• Own hiring, leveling, growth, and performance. Build the management bench, with individual-contributor and manager tracks that give strong engineers a path.
• Own the budget and tooling spend, invested deliberately across talent and modern tooling.

EDUCATION & EXPERIENCE:

• 12+ years in software engineering, including 6+ years leading engineering organizations through managers and leads, not only managing individual contributors directly
• A track record of building teams that own a product surface end to end, decompose their own work, and grow with the business
• Direct experience adopting AI-assisted development across a team, and a clear point of view on how it changes throughput, review practices, and quality
• A record of building engineering-owned quality: shifting it upstream through automated testing and CI/CD so teams own it
• Experience running remote engineering teams, with the operating rhythm that keeps delivery predictable
• Ownership of an engineering budget and headcount plan, fluency making tradeoffs with Product and Finance, and the operating discipline to run on delivery and reliability metrics (DORA or equivalent)
• Located in and authorized to work in the US (no visa sponsorship), available during regular US business hours

Preferred Skills

• Has scaled AI-assisted development across a full engineering team, with the review and quality gates that make it work
• Marketplace, gig-economy, or consumer-app experience, and familiarity with two-sided matching and booking dynamics
• Mobile and web at scale, including native app release management (release trains, feature flags, staged rollout)
• Platform or core-services thinking: turning shared backend capability into an internal product the front-end teams consume
• Experience taking a 0-to-1 product from first markets to national scale

What Success Looks Like

First 30- 60 days

• A clear point of view on how the organization should grow, socialized, with the first moves planned and sequenced so delivery keeps moving
• Metrics baseline in place (deploy frequency, lead time to change, change-failure rate, time to restore), so the org has a shared read on where it stands
• Named owners for cross-cutting technical decisions, and a clear picture of where the leadership bench needs to deepen

First 90 days

• The first team is owning its customer journey end to end, with engineering leads co-owning acceptance criteria alongside product
• AI-assisted development is the default in the standard workflow, with team-level cycle time and throughput measured against the baseline
• Automated testing and CI/CD carry more of the quality load, and change-failure rate is trending down
• Yourgi Connect has a technical plan through national scale, and the team is shipping against it

BENEFITS & PERKS:

• Health, vision, dental, long- & short-term disability, and life insurance
• A startup mentality with stable funding