VP Engineering

About Oden:

We are on the brink of the next industrial revolution and Oden is at the forefront to usher in the new era of manufacturing.

We’re on a mission to eliminate waste in manufacturing. Manufacturing has long been an analog world, but this has changed, now manufacturers are overloaded with data but few insights. 

We empower engineering and operations leaders to find and solve and prevent quality and performance issues through our advanced analytics and pre-built ML models. Through our manufacturing analytics platform, we bring a new level of efficiency, sustainability and competitiveness to the people who make our world.

Why We Do It:

We like to enable those who make things - to make more, to waste less, to serve their customers, and to thrive in a competitive world. Help enough makers, and the world can give us all the abundance we want for less cost and environmental impact. We’re on the verge of a 4th industrial revolution that begs for absolute efficiency in all factors of life. We plan to deliver that to everyone who makes things.

The Role:

We’re looking for an innovative VP, Engineering to establish the overall technical direction and architecture for Oden. This role will lead, scale and enable a hybrid Engineering team to deliver a world-class data platform to deliver actionable insights to our customers. This is a critical role that deeply understands product-led development and believes deeply in integrating our core value of customer-centricity across the Engineering team. They create a vision for their department and a purpose for why people are doing what they do and relentlessly communicate this to the team.

They are a magnet for top talent and understand how to build, recruit and scale teams at our crucial stage of growing the Engineering team from 10-20 to 50-70. They are not a 10X engineer but they are strong enough technically to understand the product entirely and be a technical sounding board for top engineers. They will manage engineering teams that build and maintain our platform, including 2 product-led development teams, core data, integrations, and infrastructure. They will create, hire and grow current team members into a second layer of management in the organization while creating exciting growth opportunities for both individual contributors and managers.

The VP, Engineering will be an integral part of the leadership team and work closely with our Data Science and Product teams along with Commercials teams to cross-functionally align on the business roadmap. 

This role will preferably be based in our New York office 2-3 days per week; however; we are open to remote for the right candidate.

Responsibilities Include But Not Limited To:

1. Recruiting, Leading and Enabling a Hybrid Engineering Team

• Build, recruit, develop and retain talent and leadership across Oden’s Engineering organization; scale the Engineering team from 15 to 50 over the course of the next 18-24 months 
• Lead the Engineering team with principles consistent with Oden’s values. This includes the demonstrated ability to think strategically, deliver results, build a high-performing organization, continuously grow and learn, lead across departmental boundaries, and inspire the organization to deliver remarkable customer experiences.
• Provide mentorship and leadership to a closely-knit, highly-functioning hybrid Engineering team to challenge and grow both individual contributors and team leads and managers
• Create a ‘deliberately developmental’ culture of ownership, proactivity, inclusivity, problem-solving, and delivery. You are setting the standard for high quality products being delivered, and can achieve this in the medium-term through creating the right culture and rewarding the right behaviour

Technical Leadership

• Lead the technical direction and architecture of Oden’s platform, working closely with Data Science and Product Leadership to create a unified Tech Vision to excite both employees and customers
• Support product-led development teams through a delicate balance of autonomy vs. clearing the path to be successful and integrate our core value of customer-centricity across the Engineering Team. Be a thoughtful technical voice and support your team in making diligent architectural decisions
• Develop tech leads and managers to run engineering sprints, while balancing technical debt, to ensure that our development velocity achieves our business goals in a timely manner while achieving goals for scalability, product development and minimizing incidents
• Own the technology budget, including workforce planning, software cost optimization, and establishing principles and standards for evaluating make/buy decisions in both current and future states.

Leadership Team Contributor

• Participate in the leadership team quarterly strategic planning and weekly meeting cadences by providing a strong, collaborative engineering voice. Communicate the context and consequences of different strategies’ impact on engineering. 
• Work with the other Tech teams and Commercials teams to cross-functionally align on the business roadmap. Develop an innovation strategy that leverages external technical partnerships. Identify, negotiate, and develop strategic technical partnerships to support business priorities and objectives. 
• Provide visibility for internal and external stakeholders (e.g. Board of Directors, investors, customers) into engineering, and manage internal and external communications for engineering strategy.

Preferred Experience:

• 10+ years of relevant experience in progressive engineering management roles in a software company, with 5+ years of experience building and scaling high-performing engineering teams especially from sizes of 10-20 to 40-50 over 12-24 months. You have developed a philosophy on how to build teams and ship world-class products while being open to new ideas and evolving that philosophy.
• Technical experience, or technical degrees, are less important than being able to establish technical credibility and drive a technical agenda with a strong engineering organization. You should broadly know best practices for full software development life cycle with the ability to understand and discuss technical concepts, trade-offs and new ideas with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Exceptional leadership and communication skills – a good listener who can be both empathetic and pragmatic
• A decisive leader who makes good decisions by listening well, pulls from both past experience and continuous learning and experimenting and appropriately balances short-term versus long-term considerations.
• Demonstrated ability to deliver scalable, cloud-based software - along with experience building and delivering high-performance, reliable distributed systems. 
• Strong interpersonal skills and a knack for productive collaboration across varying departments through effective consensus building
• Proven problem solver who can make clear-headed decisions while under pressure

What We Offer You:

• Measurable impact on the world and the chance to help real people - family businesses, entrepreneurs, engineers.
• An opportunity to build lasting, collaborative relationships with visionary C-level clients in the manufacturing, Industry 4.0, and AI spaces
• A platform that has the potential to evolve beyond what we have envisioned now.
• Scientific and transparent thinking, for everyone involved.

We’re an equal opportunity employer (EOE). 

Diversity at Oden means building a team that is rich across all boundaries of race, ethnicity, gender identification, sexual orientation, disability, religion, age and thinking style. We welcome all backgrounds, life experiences, and worldviews as this is the catalyst for the rapid evolution of our product and our organization. Diversity allows us to tackle new challenges, embrace change, make well-informed decisions, and ultimately Make Things Better. In alignment with our “People First” company value, Oden has a passionate internal team dedicated to the promotion of diversity and inclusion initiatives as a core component of our culture.

Our diversity initiatives apply to our practices and policies on recruiting, compensation and benefits; professional development; promotions; social activities, and the ongoing development of a psychologically safe work environment