VP of Engineering

About Cohesion

Cohesion builds the software, AI, and advisory services that connect people, systems, and spaces in commercial real estate: access control, smart maintenance, tenant experience, and energy management, all from one platform.

About the position

Cohesion is hiring a full-time VP of Engineering to lead our engineering organization and own the quality, reliability, and health of our product. You report to the CEO. You own engineering delivery and outcomes end to end, from architecture, observability, and integrations through security, compliance, and team operating cadence. You also speed up our move to agentic engineering.

You lead a blended team of FTE and contract engineers, plus our Technical Support team, so you own the full loop from a customer ticket to a verified product fix. You partner closely with product leadership and our customer-facing teams to ship more reliably and mature how we build software.

Product quality is the top priority. We want a leader who finds problems before they get reported. You put logging and monitoring in place before they're needed, keep a constant eye on the health of our integrations, and treat recurring support tickets as a sign the product needs fixing.

This is a high-trust role. You set direction, make decisions independently, and produce visible improvements quickly. Compensation includes base salary, bonus, and equity.

What you will do

Product quality, reliability, and technical support

• Own the overall quality and health of the product. Set quality targets (defect escape rate, recurring ticket volume, uptime, integration health) and report on them regularly.
• Put structured logging, monitoring, and alerting in place across the platform so we find problems before our customers do.
• Monitor the health of customer integrations (building systems, IoT devices, third-party connections, and data feeds) and fix failures before they affect customers.
• Analyze ticket trends with your Technical Support team, then drive product fixes that eliminate the root causes of recurring issues.
• Own engineering follow-through: issues are resolved, verified in production, and closed out, with nothing falling through the cracks.
• Lead and grow the Technical Support team. Hire, coach, and set clear expectations for responsiveness, accuracy, and customer communication.
• Own support operations in Zendesk: SLAs, triage, escalation paths, and the handoff of bugs and defects into Linear for engineering.
• Set and report on support metrics (first response time, time to resolution, backlog, CSAT) alongside product quality targets.
• Keep the customer-facing self-help library and support documentation current as the product ships changes.

Agentic engineering

• Help our FTE and contract engineers scale their use of Claude Code, so agents do most of the coding work and engineers focus on design and longer-lived architecture decisions.
• Build a loop architecture that lets agents check their work and improve over time.
• Create an environment where non-engineers can prototype in these tools and hand work to engineers to finish.

Engineering delivery and process

• Own engineering development, bug fixing, and defect resolution, including roll-back vs. fix-forward decisions in production.
• Track and improve DORA metrics at the team and individual level.
• Run estimation, sprint planning, and sprint execution, and remove blockers as scrum master.
• Meet defined "Ready" and "Definition of Done" targets.
• Own QA, release checklists, and release notes.
• Run technical onboarding for new engineers: documentation, access, and knowledge transfer.

Architecture, platform, and operations

• Own system architecture, designed for scalability, maintainability, and the realities of our customers' environments.
• Run DevOps and CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions) and deployment workflows from dev through prod.
• Manage infrastructure, networking, and monitoring across Azure and Vercel.
• Own disaster recovery, backup strategy, restoration procedures, and tested runbooks.
• Lead integrations development and data acquisition: APIs, IoT, third-party connections, and ETL ingestion for customer data.

Security, compliance, and tooling

• Own security, safeguards, access controls, and vulnerability management.
• Drive SOC 2 compliance from the engineering side (and ISO 27001 and GDPR as we scale), partnering with Vanta and our DevOps lead.
• Evaluate and adopt modern tooling, including AI-assisted development tools like Claude Code and Cursor, to improve engineering efficiency.

Our tooling

• Zendesk for customer support
• Linear for engineering work tracking
• Claude Code for AI-assisted and agentic development
• Azure for infrastructure
• Databricks for our data platform
• Vanta for security compliance

Required qualifications

• 10+ years building and operating production software in a B2B SaaS environment, with engineering leadership experience at the Director or VP level in your most recent roles.
• A track record of measurably improving a product's stability: instrumenting systems with logging and observability, driving down recurring defects and support volume, and keeping integrations healthy.
• Experience managing a technical support function, including SLAs, escalation, and using ticket data to set engineering priorities.
• Hands-on technical depth. You can review architecture, dive into a pipeline, and read code, and you work as a player-coach.
• Proven experience running sprints, releases, incidents, and on-call in a startup or scale-up environment.
• Direct experience leading or materially supporting SOC 2 (Type I or II), ISO 27001, or GDPR programs from the engineering side.
• Production experience with Azure, plus CI/CD in Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions.
• Comfort working through engineering concepts with engineers and explaining the work and outcomes to non-technical audiences.
• A pragmatic ownership mindset. You choose the simplest thing that works and harden from there.

What you can expect from Cohesion

Cohesion is proud to offer a comprehensive benefits package to eligible, full-time employees in the United States. Our benefits are designed to invest in our employees and their families, supporting their health, happiness, and overall quality of life.

Health and wellness

United Healthcare PPO medical coverage, dental and vision through MetLife, short and long-term disability, a $40 monthly wellness reimbursement, and pet insurance.

Retirement

401(k) with a 100% match on the first 1% of compensation, plus a 50% match on the next 5%.

Work-life balance

Paid time off (PTO): enjoy a responsible unlimited PTO program after 3 months of employment.

Remote work: up to 4 weeks annually of fully remote work.

Hybrid work environment: Chicago-based employees work out of our bright and sunny HQ office Tuesday through Thursday, with snacks, drinks, collaboration space, and an outdoor patio overlooking the Chicago River.

Professional development and culture

Collaborative environment: work in an open environment with optional creative brainstorming sessions for all employees.

Annual all-staff gathering: participate in a two-day mix of professional development and fun.

Monthly events: enjoy an all-employee lunch per month, an all-employee breakfast per month, and monthly social events.

Additional perks: $50 monthly cell phone reimbursement and tax-free transit benefits.

At Cohesion, we see diversity and inclusion as a source of strength. We believe building trust and innovation are best achieved through diverse thought and practice. Individuals seeking employment at Cohesion are considered without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.