Vice President of Engineering Full Technical & Operational Leadership
Location
USA, East Coast (Greater Philadelphia preferred)
Work Model
Hybrid
Reports To
CTO, with direct accountability to CEO
Team Scope
~30-person globally distributed engineering org
Compensation
Competitive base + equity + benefits
About Xpoint
Xpoint is a B2B geolocation verification and fraud detection company serving regulated online gaming operators across 30+ U.S. jurisdictions. Every real-money wager placed online in the United States must be geolocation-verified before it is accepted. Xpoint provides the technology that makes that possible – processing millions of verification requests daily for some of the largest operators in the industry. We serve major clients including Bet365, Fanatics, PrizePicks, and Rush Street Interactive, with an expanding pipeline into new verticals such as prediction markets and international markets. Xpoint is venture-backed, post-Series A, and positioned as the only credible alternative to the legacy incumbent in a market worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually. This is a high-stakes, technically demanding, and deeply regulated domain. Our SDK is embedded directly in our clients’ mobile and web applications, which means our engineering quality, uptime, and release discipline have direct commercial and regulatory consequences.
The Role
We are hiring a VP of Engineering who will own both the technical direction and the operational execution of our engineering organization. This is a role for someone who can own the full stack of engineering leadership: architecture, infrastructure, delivery, talent, and culture. You will work closely with our CTO as a strong technical peer, sharing ownership of Xpoint’s technical direction. The CTO focuses on long-range architecture and technical strategy; you will own the execution, operational excellence, and day-to-day technical decision-making that keeps the engineering organization delivering at a high level. We need both roles operating with depth and autonomy – not a manager waiting for direction. This is a high-autonomy, high-accountability role reporting to the CTO with direct interaction and accountability to the CEO. You will have a seat at the executive table and influence over company strategy, product direction, and go-to-market decisions.
Technical Ownership
You will be expected to go deep, not just manage from above. • Contribute to technical architecture decisions and own the execution of system design, infrastructure, and scalability. Review code and architecture when needed – not as a ceremony, but because your judgment matters. • Drive engineering across all product areas – including SDK, backend services, and platform infrastructure. Understand the tradeoffs between shipping fast and shipping right in a regulated environment. • Be capable of owning infrastructure and reliability: cloud architecture (AWS), observability, incident response, SLA management, and the operational posture of a system that processes millions of daily verification requests with zero tolerance for downtime. • Own key functional areas for engineering, such as security, fraud detection, and location verification accuracy. You should be able to think adversarially about spoofing, emulation, VPN detection, and device integrity. • Make build-vs-buy decisions with clear-eyed cost and capability analysis, not ideology.
Delivery & Operations
You will own the machine that turns ideas into shipped, reliable software. • Be capable of running engineering delivery end-to-end – sprint planning, capacity allocation, cross-team coordination, and release management – ensuring the team ships on time, on quality, and with minimal rework through strong engineering managers and well-defined processes. • Establish and enforce engineering KPIs that actually matter: deployment frequency, lead time, incident response, defect escape rate, client-impacting issues. Eliminate vanity metrics. • Manage a globally distributed team with engineering resources overseas. You must be effective at asynchronous leadership, timezone-aware planning, and building trust across cultures and geographies. • Own the relationship between engineering and client-facing teams (Customer Success, Product, Sales). When a client escalation has a technical root cause, you are the person in the room.
Talent & Culture
You will build and retain the team that builds the product. • Recruit, develop, mentor, and retain high-caliber engineers. Build a bench of senior technical talent that reduces single points of failure. • Define the engineering culture: high standards, low ego, relentless on quality, generous with knowledge, performance management and accountability. Keep Xpoint a place where strong engineers want to stay. • Develop team members’ technical and leadership capabilities. Create clear growth paths that don’t require becoming a manager. • Continuously evaluate and optimize team structure, cost efficiency, and performance to ensure the engineering organization is right-sized and high-performing.
Client & Commercial Awareness
You will engage with clients and represent Xpoint’s technical credibility. • Participate in client-facing technical discussions with major operators. You should be able to hold your own in a room with Bet365’s or Fanatics’ technical leadership. • Understand the regulatory landscape across U.S. gaming jurisdictions and how it affects engineering requirements, testing, and release cadence. • Contribute to competitive strategy. Understand what GeoComply, Radar, and other players are doing technically and help Xpoint stay ahead. • Support due diligence and technical evaluation in the context of strategic partnerships or corporate transactions as needed.
Requirements
Must Have • 12+ years in software engineering with at least 5 years in a senior engineering leadership role (VP Engineering, Head of Engineering, or equivalent). • Deep hands-on technical background: you’ve architected and shipped production systems at scale, not just managed teams that did. • Experience with cloud-native infrastructure (AWS strongly preferred), microservices, mobile SDKs, and high-throughput, low-latency systems. • Proven track record leading distributed, international engineering teams (20–50+ engineers). • Experience at a growth-stage or late-startup company (Series A through C). You know what it feels like when there’s no playbook and you have to build the plane while flying it. • Strong executive communication skills. You can present to a board, negotiate with a client, and give hard feedback to a direct report – all in the same day. Strong Preference • Experience in regulated industries (gaming, fintech, healthcare, defense) where compliance is a first-class engineering concern, not an afterthought. • Background in security engineering, fraud detection, or adversarial systems. • Experience with SDK product development and the unique challenges of shipping code that runs inside someone else’s application. • Familiarity with geolocation, device fingerprinting, or identity verification technologies. • Experience operating at the intersection of technical strategy and execution – not purely a people manager, and not purely an architect, but someone who has done both at a company of similar or larger scale. Who This Role Is Not For • If your strength is purely people management and you rely on a CTO or principal engineer to make technical calls, this is not the right fit. • If you need a large team and mature infrastructure to be effective, this will be frustrating. We are 40 people. You will sometimes roll up your sleeves. • If you prefer consensus-driven, low-urgency environments, this is a fast-moving, high-stakes business where decisions have regulatory and commercial consequences.
Benefits
Competitive, people-first benefits designed to support your health, financial future, and work-life balance. Xpoint is committed to investing in employees and their families with a comprehensive U.S. benefits package, including: • Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance • 100% employer-paid employee health premiums • 50% employer-paid premiums for eligible dependents • 3 weeks of paid vacation starting in the first year • Paid sick time and company holidays • 401(k) retirement plan with strong company match • 100% company-paid life insurance, AD&D, and short-term disability • Optional employee-paid long-term disability
• Equity participation
