VP of Engineering

Job Description

Job Description

Octagon Talent Solutions is a full-service technology recruitment and staffing company based in South Florida. We humanize technical recruitment by identifying candidates' long-term career goals and assessing cultural fit when presenting opportunities. Our focus on long-term relationships helps ensure placements that last.

Job Overview: We’re hiring a hands-on VP of Engineering (CTO-equivalent) to lead architecture and execution for an industrial AI platform that connects edge sensors and factory systems to cloud intelligence. This is a builder role for a technical leader who stays close to the code, thrives in early-stage environments, and can translate real-world industrial problems into scalable products. Location: Remote (United States) .

RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Own end-to-end architecture for an Industrial OS spanning edge connectivity (RTSP cameras, vibration/thermal/time -series sensors, PLC signals via OPC-UA/Modbus), multimodal ingestion/normalization, and cloud orchestration.
• Lead technical strategy and design decisions for a secure, reliable, scalable platform supporting real-time video + sensor + PLC fusion and high-uptime production environments.
• Remain hands-on in the codebase: implement and refactor critical components, review PRs, debug production issues, and run design reviews (Python/TypeScript).
• Build, mentor, and lead a high-performing engineering team in a flat, accountable org—setting the quality bar and raising execution speed.
• Drive the shared intelligence layer to capture reusable templates and patterns from deployments (with privacy-safe anonymization), accelerating future onboardings.
• Partner with product and founders on roadmap and delivery—shipping from prototypes to production agents (vision quality, predictive maintenance/anomaly, and operations planning).
• Represent the technical vision externally with customers and investors via demos, architecture narratives, and product credibility.

REQUIREMENTS:

• 8+ years in senior engineering leadership (VP/Head of Engineering/CTO), with clear examples of owning architecture decisions for complex distributed systems.
• Demonstrated hands-on technical depth —recent coding, system design, and technical decision-making (not strategy-only leadership).
• Proven experience building products 0-to-1 in a startup or VC-backed environment (founder or early engineering leadership experience a plus).
• Heavy industry exposure (manufacturing, energy, utilities, oil & gas, defense) and/or industrial platform experience serving these environments.
• Experience with industrial/physical systems and data platforms: IoT/edge computing, streaming pipelines, sensor-driven systems, time-series data, and integrations with enterprise systems (ERP/CMMS/WMS/historians).
• Strong product intuition and ability to guide product direction alongside engineering.
• Ability to communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders; confident leading demos and discussions.

NICE TO HAVE:

• Digital twin / simulation / high-fidelity data or industrial AI platform experience.
• Familiarity with ontology/asset modeling, multimodal ML pipelines, and production ML inference integration.
• Defense tech or other high-stakes, complex systems background.

NOT A FIT IF:

• Experience is primarily consumer tech or financial services without industrial systems exposure.
• Leadership profile is primarily managerial/consultative without recent hands-on technical ownership.