This is not a normal VP of Engineering role.
Most of our production code isn't hand-written. All of it is read, reviewed, and owned by the engineers who ship it. The tooling changed how the work gets done, not who's accountable for it. Our teams already work Claude-first, and we're not looking for someone to introduce that. We're looking for someone to lead an org where it's already the baseline.
That's a different job than the title usually describes. Less process, more judgment. You'll decide what's worth standardizing on, where agentic workflows genuinely pay off and where they quietly cost more than they save, and how to hold quality and security steady while the ground keeps moving. You don't need a position on whether all this is good for the profession, but you do need to be paying close attention to it.
The basics still apply. You've shipped real software, made architectural calls you'd defend, and earned the kind of respect that makes good engineers want to work for you.
About Tassel
More than 700 colleges and universities already use Tassel to power critical student milestones. Millions of students and families already touch our platform.
Higher education is entering one of the most disruptive periods in its history. Declining enrollment. Shrinking budgets. AI changing the workforce. Universities need to build relationships that last a lifetime instead of transactions that last a semester.
We continue to expand from graduation into the only relationship platform for higher education - connecting admissions, enrollment, graduation, alumni, fundraising, mentoring, and everything in between.
What You’ll Do
Own engineering delivery. You'll partner closely with product to shape a roadmap your teams can actually execute, surface technical obstacles early enough that they never become blockers, and run the migrations we need without stalling new product work.
Be engineering's voice at the executive table. That means absorbing where the business is headed and translating it into a technical strategy the whole org can understand and act on.
Lead how we adopt AI in engineering. That means hunting for real leverage in the tooling, evaluating what's worth standardizing on, and setting the guardrails on quality and security as adoption spreads.
You won't spend most of your week in an editor. You'll write code sometimes, prototype when that's faster than explaining, and participate in code review often. What matters more is that you still think like an engineer: when something breaks or stalls, your instinct is to go look at the system rather than schedule a meeting about it.
Who You Are
You're a product engineer first and a leader second. You'll manage people, including other managers, and you'll need to be good at handing work off. Your teams won't get room to build if you're still carrying things someone else should own.
You've built or modernized products used by millions of people. You've made architectural calls that were genuinely hard, rewritten platforms when that was the right answer, and talked people out of rewrites when it wasn't.
You keep up with the tooling yourself, whether that's Claude Code, Cursor, coding agents, MCPs, or whatever lands next. You try things early, before there's any consensus that you should.
Engineers want to work for you. They know the standard goes up when you're around, and that they'll be better for having worked with you.
What We Believe
- Autonomous AI-native teams always outperform traditional larger ones.
- AI-native engineers will outperform traditional organizations.
- Shipping beats debating. Inaction is often worse than learning from mistakes.
- Simplicity scales. Bureaucracy compounds.
- Great architecture creates leverage. Great leaders still build.
Non-Negotiables
Please don’t apply if:
- You haven’t shipped meaningful production code recently.
- You prioritize tools and systems you’ve always worked with.
- Your calendar is entirely meetings.
- You optimize for process before product.
- You manage engineers but no longer engineer.
We’d love to see:
- Evaluating and governing AI tooling - guardrails, quality, security
- System architecture and scalability at a platform level
- Technical debt strategy - knowing when to pay it down vs. defer
- Side projects you’re genuinely proud of.
- AI workflows you’ve developed yourself.
- Technical writing, libraries, agents, MCP servers, or products you’ve built.
- Security architecture and reliability/SRE (incident response, on-call, SLAs)
- Build-vs-buy and vendor/tooling decisions
- Driving org-wide adoption of AI coding tools and agentic workflows
The tech
We’re less interested in checking boxes than how you think, but experience with technologies like these is helpful:
- .NET / C# / Azure
- TypeScript
- React
- PostgreSQL / MSSQL
- GraphQL
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- CI/CD
- Claude Code
- MCPs
In Your First Year
You’ll help us:
- Increase engineering velocity by multiples, not percentages.
- Modernize our platform for the next decade.
- Recruit an elite AI-native engineering organization.
- Remove unnecessary complexity across our systems.
- Build products faster without sacrificing quality.
- Make Tassel one of the best examples of what an AI-native software company looks like.
What Success Looks Like
The best engineers in the industry start reaching out because they want to work with your team.
Engineers ship more while writing less code. Customers notice that product velocity feels impossible.
The organization becomes dramatically more effective without becoming dramatically larger. You help prove that a small AI-native engineering team can outperform organizations many times its size.
One Last Thing
We’re not hiring someone to preserve the way software has always been built. We’re hiring someone to invent what engineering looks like next.
If you’re still shipping every week, obsessed with AI, and excited to solve some of the hardest problems in higher education, we’d love to talk.