VP of Engineering

THE ESSENTIALS Work policy: 5 days in-office. Non-negotiable. Base salary: $400,000–$500,000 Equity: 1.0%–2.0% (founding executive tier) Reports to: Srinivas Njay, CEO Peer to: Bruce Kim, CTO Team size: Scaling to 30+ over the next 18 months

The Mission

For 50 years, real financial intelligence has been gated by wealth. If you have $250K+ in assets, you get a private wealth manager. If you don’t, you get a dashboard and a stack of disconnected apps that each see a sliver of your financial life. AI changes that economic equation permanently.

BankGPT is building personal financial intelligence for every American. An AI that sees every account a person has, understands their complete financial picture in real time, and acts on their behalf — finding better rates, negotiating bills, moving money, matching products, executing on goals. Not a dashboard. Not a chatbot. A new category of consumer product.

55% of Americans have already used AI for financial tasks. 86% say it helps them understand their finances. The demand is already here. The product isn’t. We’re building it, and we have day-one distribution reaching 200M+ Americans through an existing institutional channel — meaning the software we ship in Q1 reaches real users in Q1, not Q5.

“If you can drive a car from point A to point B without steering, can you have AI drive your financial goals from point A to point B without being a financial expert?” — Srinivas Njay, CEO

Why This Role Exists

Bruce Kim, our CTO and co-founder, has already built the production AI platform that serves millions of user interactions today. He owns architecture, AI infrastructure, and the technical long-term bets. He’s a peer of yours, not your boss.

As we scale from the founding engineering team (less than 10 today) to 30+ engineers in the next 18 months and deliver a multi-surface consumer AI product at scale, we need a VP of Engineering who owns the engineering organization — hiring, performance, culture, process, delivery — as a true partner to the CTO and a peer to the other founding executives.

This is not a coordinator role. It’s not a chief of staff role dressed up as engineering. You will make technical decisions daily, write code, and own the quality bar of the entire engineering function. You will recruit the engineers who will build the most important consumer AI product in financial services. And you will report directly to the CEO.

What You’ll Own

Engineering Organization

• Scale the engineering team from under 10 to 30+ engineers over 18 months. You own the hiring process end-to-end — sourcing, screening, closing, onboarding.
• Build the engineering culture from the ground up. Performance expectations, code review norms, technical writing standards, meeting cadence, engineering OS.
• Hire, mentor, promote, and (when necessary) exit engineering talent. Raise the bar every quarter.
• Shape engineering career ladders, compensation bands, and equity philosophy as the team grows.

Technical Delivery

• Own the engineering delivery of BankGPT across all surfaces: consumer mobile and web applications, the multi-model AI orchestration layer, real-time financial data aggregation engine, Computer Use runtime for legacy system automation, and the Agent Store platform.
• Partner with Bruce on architecture decisions. You bring organizational rigor and delivery discipline; he brings deep technical direction. Together you set the technical direction for the company.
• Run the engineering operating system: sprint planning, roadmap execution, release management, incident response, on-call rotation, technical debt management.
• Own quality. Financial AI has zero tolerance for hallucinations or incorrect financial plans. Our bar is <0.5% hallucination rate on financial queries. You own the evaluation framework, the QA infrastructure, and the release gates that make this real.

Company Leadership

• Sit on the founding executive team. Peer to Bruce (CTO), VPs and future executive hires. Report directly to Srinivas.
• Partner with product leadership daily. You’ll work closely with our two senior PMs on roadmap, prioritization, and launch execution.
• Represent engineering externally — recruiting, investor updates, technical partnerships, design-partner conversations.
• Help set the strategic direction of the company. Your technical judgment shapes what’s possible, and what’s possible shapes what we go after.

Who You Are

Experience

• 10+ years of engineering experience with 4+ years leading teams of 15+ engineers. You’ve been a Director, Sr. Director, or VP of Engineering at a consumer product company, AI-first startup, or modern fintech.
• You’ve shipped consumer products at real scale (million+ users). You know what it takes to operate at that scale — latency, reliability, telemetry, incident response, global performance.
• You’ve hired an engineering organization before. You have strong opinions about what makes an engineer great and how to evaluate for it fast. You’ve written the ladder, run calibrations, managed out underperformers, and promoted people you believed in.
• You still code, or you coded within the last three years. You’re technical enough to make architecture calls, push back on Bruce when you disagree, and pair with an engineer on a tough problem when the moment calls for it.

AI Fluency

• You are extremely AI-fluent. You’ve rebuilt your own workflow around AI tools (Claude, Cursor, Copilot, GPT) and you have strong opinions about which to use when. You can 2–3x your own output with AI workflows. This is not optional — the culture we’re building assumes this.
• You’ve shipped LLM-powered features in production or led a team that has. You understand the operational realities of running AI at scale: eval frameworks, hallucination mitigation, model routing, cost management, latency budgets.
• You think AI is a compounding advantage for engineering orgs, not a novelty. You’ve already internalized that.

Leadership Style

• You move fast. You ship weekly. You measure obsessively. You believe in small teams with high autonomy over large teams with lots of process.
• You earn trust through technical substance, not title. You’d rather pair with an engineer for an hour than run a status meeting.
• You hold a high bar on talent and aren’t afraid to make hard personnel calls. You believe the difference between a great engineering team and a good one is whether the leaders are willing to fire.
• You communicate directly. You give real feedback. You don’t manage up with performance theater.
• You’re willing to be in the office 5 days a week with the founding team. You see this as a feature, not a cost. You know this is how we ship 3x faster than hybrid teams.

What We’re Not Looking For

We’re explicit about this to save everyone’s time:

• Not looking for someone who wants to be a people manager and has let their technical skills atrophy. We’re a founding team; you need to be technical.
• Not looking for someone optimizing for remote flexibility. If 5 days in-office is a deal-breaker, we’re not the right fit — and that’s fine.
• Not looking for someone who needs a fully built-out engineering process to operate in. You’re here to build the process.
• Not looking for someone with traditional fintech pedigree. This is a consumer AI company that happens to touch financial data. Consumer product instincts and AI fluency matter more than banking domain knowledge (which can be learned in weeks).

Why You’ll Want This Role

Category-Defining Outcome Potential

If we execute, BankGPT is a $1T+ outcome. The market is verified (55% of Americans already use AI for finance), the distribution is contractually locked in (day-one reach to 200M+ users), the team has shipped before, and we have a working product already serving millions of interactions. The VP Engineering role carries founding-executive equity at 1.0–2.0% — real ownership, not a token.

Real Technical Ownership

You’re not inheriting a legacy codebase or optimizing an existing product. You’re shaping the architecture, engineering culture, and quality bar of a company that will serve hundreds of millions of users. Decisions you make in the first six weeks will define engineering at BankGPT for years.

Direct Daily Contact with the Founders

Srinivas (CEO, ex-Microsoft, bootstrapped to several 10s of millions in ARR) and Bruce (CTO, built the production AI platform serving millions today) are both hands-on daily. You won’t be buffered from them. You won’t manage through PowerPoint. You’ll have their direct attention on every important call.

Ship at Scale, Week One

Most consumer AI startups spend their first two years figuring out distribution. We already have it. What your team ships in Q1 reaches real users in Q1 — not Q5. You iterate on real behavior data, real retention curves, real cohort math from the start.

Build the Engineering Team You Want to Work With

You’re hiring 20+ engineers over the next 18 months. You pick them. You set the bar. You shape the culture. For most senior engineering leaders, this is the one opportunity in a career where you get to build the team you’ve always wanted to work on.

Compensation & Benefits

We publish ranges because we respect your time. Here is the real math:

• Base salary: $400,000–$500,000, depending on experience. Top of the band for candidates with prior VP Engineering experience at a venture-backed consumer product company.
• Equity: 1.0%–2.0% (founding executive tier). At a $1B outcome, $10M–$25M. At $5B, $50M–$125M. At $10B, $100M–$250M.
• Full benefits: medical, dental, vision, 401(k), FSA/HSA, commuter benefits.
• Relocation support for the right candidate, if moving to SF is required.

The Founders

Srinivas Njay — CEO

Spent years in the banking industry building consumer technology. Previously at Microsoft. Deep domain expertise in the distribution channel that gets BankGPT to 200M+ users on day one. Hands-on daily across product, engineering, strategy, and recruiting. Featured on Forbes’ “Bootstrap Baller” cover for building a previous AI platform in banking.

Bruce Kim — CTO

Built the production AI platform that currently serves millions of user interactions in real banking workflows. Has a working Computer Use integration with Q2 (one of the largest legacy banking platforms) already demonstrated — agents navigating legacy banking UIs with computer vision, maintaining authenticated sessions, filling forms, executing transactions with audit trails. Technical, hands-on, still codes daily.

Interview Process

We move fast. Expected total timeline from first call to signed offer: 2–3 weeks.

• Stage 1: 30-minute intro call with Srinivas (CEO). Mutual fit conversation — you ask us as many questions as we ask you.
• Stage 2: 90-minute technical deep-dive with Bruce (CTO). Walk through a system you’ve built, plus an architecture conversation about one of our current problems.
• Stage 3: Leadership and culture conversation with Srinivas and the founding team (90 minutes).
• Stage 4: Onsite at 44 Montgomery: half-day. Time with Bruce on technical depth,meeting other VPs. End with 90 minutes with Srinivas on strategy and scope.
• Stage 5: Offer within 48 hours of onsite. Reference conversations on both sides.

How to Apply

Apply through our Greenhouse board, or just email srinivas@bankgpt.ai directly with a note telling me why this is the right move for you now. No cover letter theater — three paragraphs is plenty. What you’ve built, why you’re restless, what you want to own next.

If you know someone who’d be perfect for this and you’re not interested in yourself, we’re offering a $10,000 referral fee on a successful hire. A warm intro with a line or two of context is all it takes.