About Aldea

Aldea is building frontier AI infrastructure: high-accuracy speech-to-text, low-latency text-to-speech, and long-context LLM systems designed for real-time, multimodal interaction. We operate as a deeply technical, research-first organization where engineers and researchers collaborate directly, move quickly, and ship production-grade systems with high reliability.

We are now hiring our first VP of Engineering to architect, scale, and lead the engineering function as we transition from early R&D velocity toward repeatable, reliable, high-performance AI product delivery.

The Role

Reporting into the CTO, you will be the senior-most engineering leader at Aldea, responsible for shaping the engineering organization, establishing world-class execution systems, and partnering closely with the CTO, CEO, and Product to drive productization of our foundation models and APIs.

This is a hands-on executive role: part systems architect, part org builder, part operational leader. You will design the infrastructure that allows small, highly senior teams to deliver at speed while upholding rigorous engineering quality, reliability, and safety.

What You’ll Own

1. Engineering Strategy & Architecture

• Define Aldea’s engineering strategy across infrastructure, training, inference, and productization.
• Partner with research to translate model breakthroughs into productionized systems and customer-ready APIs.
• Own architectural decision-making for distributed systems, GPU scheduling, model runtime, latency optimization, and reliability.

2. Execution Systems & Operational Excellence

• Implement scalable engineering processes: sprint structures, planning cadences, QA workflows, release management, and on-call rotations.
• Build clarity around readiness criteria, testing windows, and deployment gates for all model and infra releases.
• Ensure engineering velocity remains high while improving production environment stability.

3. Org Design & People Leadership

• Build and lead a high-density engineering organization across infrastructure, full-stack, data, and model operations.
• Recruit, mentor, and level senior engineers who thrive on new ideas and innovation.
• Create growth paths, performance expectations, and engineering career ladders.

4. Cross-Functional Leadership

• Partner deeply with Product on roadmap, release sequencing, and prioritization.
• Work closely with Research on integration pipelines, evals, and production-readiness reviews.
• Align with BD on customer-critical features, SLAs, timelines, and implementation viability.

5. Reliability, Security & Compliance

• Lead initiatives for security, observability, model monitoring, and incident response.
• Maintain compliance posture suitable for enterprise and developer customers.
• Ensure uptime, scalability, and performance meet or exceed SLOs.

Who You Are

Technical Depth

• Expert in distributed systems, large-scale ML infrastructure, model serving, and cloud architecture.
• Comfortable choosing between building, buying, or hybridizing foundational infra.
• Experienced with GPU orchestration, caching, batching, streaming, and low-latency inference.

Leadership Style

• Hands-on, principled, and rigorous — you set a high bar for clarity, communication, and quality.
• Thrives in ambiguity and treats it as a design challenge.
• Transparent and low-ego; you collaborate with research, engineering, and product as equals.
• Strategic thinker who still enjoys diving into code, design reviews, and architectural critiques.

Experience

• 10+ years in engineering roles with 5+ in leadership.
• Has built and scaled systems to millions of requests, or high-complexity AI infra in a research org.
• Experience leading senior/staff+ engineers and building high-performance cultures.
• Background in foundational model teams, inference teams, or ML infra is a strong plus.

What Success Looks Like

In your first 6–12 months, you will:

• Establish a scalable engineering operating system the company trusts and uses daily.
• Build a cohesive engineering organization with clear owners, roles, and rhythms.
• Reduce infra instability through systematic root-cause elimination.
• Partner with Product and Research to ship reliable, performant APIs with predictable iteration cycles.
• Increase velocity and reduce time-to-inference improvements across model families.

Aldea is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive culture that celebrates authenticity to win as one. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, protected veteran status, citizenship or immigration status, or any other legally protected characteristics.

Aldea uses E-Verify to confirm employment eligibility in compliance with federal law. For more information please visit: https://www.e-verify.gov.

Please note: We do not accept unsolicited resumes from recruiters or employment agencies and will not be responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.