VP, Engineering

About the role

ABOUT TURN/RIVER

Turn/River Capital is a private equity firm that partners with software businesses to drive AI transformation and catalyze capital-efficient growth. As a team of equal parts software operators and investors, we have the people, data-driven playbooks and flexible capital to re-architect engineering, product, go-to-market, talent and resourcing to build enduring value. Founded in 2012 and based in San Francisco, Turn/River has $5.6bn in committed capital and invests globally with a focus on North America and Europe.

ABOUT THE ROLE

Turn/River is seeking a VP of Engineering to unlock engineering capacity in our portfolio companies. You'll work directly with CTOs, CPOs, and engineering teams at our portfolio companies, building AI agents that automate recurring feature development. This is a hands-on building role where you will write agent code, design orchestration architectures, and partner with engineers daily.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

- Identify recurring, high-yield feature patterns in portfolio company backlogs that consume disproportionate engineering time and effort

- Decompose those patterns into agent task hierarchies, orchestration flows, and validation loops

- Prototype agents end-to-end yourself, proving the approach and value on real backlog items before involving other engineers

- Use data and build working demos to earn CTO/CPO buy-in in order to dedicate the engineering team to agent development

- Technically lead the agent team: review architecture, pair on hard problems, set quality bars for agent output

- Instrument and track success: agent evaluation and accuracy, engineering capacity freed, roadmap velocity, defect rates

- Apply learnings across the portfolio, sharpening the approach and playbook(s) with each engagement

QUALIFICATIONS

- 15+ years in software engineering, with production systems you personally designed, built, and shipped

- Proven capability of building agentic AI systems in production - architecting orchestration, wiring tool use, debugging agent failures - not just directing others who do

- Fluency in LLM orchestration patterns with strong convictions about agent reliability that come from lived experience, not just white-papers

- Productive in a large, unfamiliar codebase within days/weeks

- Experience in B2B or enterprise software environments, including comfort with on-prem, legacy architectures, and compliance constraints

- Ability to walk a CTO through a technical strategy and back it up with a working demo

- Effective across organizational boundaries - equally comfortable pairing with engineers and presenting to executive teams

- Consulting, PE or VC portfolio operations, or multi-company technical leadership is a plus, but not required - we want hands-on operators

LOCATION

- San Francisco, hybrid work model