Department: Engineering

Key Partners: FDE · Sales · CS · FinOps · AWS & Anthropic

Salary: $185K–$220K CAD OTE

Job Summary The Director of Engineering leads VeUP's engineering organization — the delivery engineers who build what VeUP sells: AWS migration and modernization, data and AI platforms, and agentic systems delivered to production for customers. The role owns the quality, pace, and economics of that delivery, and the people who do it.

The mandate is to build the next-generation team, not maintain the current one: fully AI-native deployment units with subject-matter depth — the Engineering/DU/Pod practice that powers FDE and VeUP's broader managed-services (MSP) motion. That takes a pioneer, not a pure IC: a leader who won't break in the unknowns, communicates with nuance through change, supports the team under load, and builds out the people behind them. Deep engineering credibility is the floor, not the job — engineering at VeUP is a revenue function.

What this role adds is durability and range — a pioneer who stays steady where there is no playbook, turns a capable group into a differentiated AI-native delivery power, and leaves a bench stronger than they found it.

Core Responsibilities

1. AI-Native Engineering Organization

- Build the deployment-unit model inside Engineering — the Engineering/DU/Pod practice that powers FDE and VeUP's broader MSP motion — pods in which every engineer works with agents as standard, on VeUP's harness, skills, and evaluation gates
- Develop the frontier specialties inside the pods — harness engineering, swarm orchestration, agent/fleet operations, graph, memory, multi-modal, multi-model pipelines — alongside AWS architecture, data, and security depth
- Set and hit leverage targets: outcomes per engineer-week, delivery effort per outcome, defects caught before acceptance
- Bring the whole team to standard: hiring profile, onboarding, upskilling, and the bar for staying — no exemptions

2. Delivery Ownership

- Own production delivery across all engineering engagements — scope, timeline, quality, acceptance — from kickoff through go-live and the evidence that the outcome held
- Own delivery operations: milestone tracking, hours by project and milestone, billing inputs on time, capacity and allocation across the book
- Own acceptance through evaluation-based gates alongside FDE; escalation point for delivery and technical risk

3. Commercial Engagement & GTM Contribution

- Show up in the sales cycle: technical discovery, scoping, estimates,



and SOW inputs that convert; proofs of concept that win
- Be responsive to sellers, Customer Success, and customers as a matter of course — same-day answers, follow-ups closed, commitments kept
- Contribute to what VeUP sells: offerings, accelerators, and reference builds Engineering can deliver repeatably at margin; delivered accounts become references

4. Team Development & Durability

- Build out the people behind you: hire, develop, retain; mentor engineers into DU leads and specialists; succession real enough that no one — including you — is a single point of failure
- Hold the team steady through the unknowns: absorb ambiguity, radiate clarity, keep the pace sustainable — the last thing this team needs is another hero who burns out
- Wear the hats the company needs — architect, reviewer, presales engineer, delivery lead — and expect the same range from the team
- Set the pace and the standard: shipping weekly, evidence over opinion, ownership over hand-off

5. Harness, Platform & Reuse

- Own harness engineering as a craft and an offer: VeUP's harness architecture — tools, execution loop, memory, orchestration — tuned or rebuilt per customer to run AI-DLC, swarms, and agent orchestration at scale, with guardrails and repeatable ROI
- Make the team an operating system: codify the practice into playbooks, harness, and skills so agents carry work through the night
- Operate every new AWS and frontier-lab agent within 30 days of GA — wrapped in the harness, judged in the arena, evaluated, and put to work for customers
- Own engineering standards — architecture, security, IaC, CI/CD, observability, code review — for agent-authored and human-authored code alike

6. Cross-Functional Leadership & Reporting

- Partner with Forward Deployed Engineering on the sales-to-delivery arc, with FinOps on cost and margin, and with Customer Success on post-go-live value
- Own Engineering KPIs — delivery health, leverage, margin, quality — reported to the VP of Delivery and the executive team; risks, slips, and wins surfaced before being asked

Certifications

Required · 90 Days: Every Anthropic Claude certification — all four,



inside the first quarter: Associate, Developer, Architect – Foundations (CCAF), Architect – Professional. Torchbearer and bar-setter — catalogue held, kept current, current exams on release.

Required · 6 Months: AWS Certified Generative AI Developer – Professional (Agentic / Amazon Bedrock AgentCore) — the one AWS credential that is a bar for this role; no other AWS cert is.

Belt · Rolling: Frontier belt — every frontier-lab credential as it ships: OpenAI Certified: Agents and Workflows (credential now; proctored exam when it opens publicly) · Hugging Face Agents + NVIDIA-Certified Associate: Generative AI LLMs · whatever xAI ships for Grok, on release day.

Qualifications

Required (must-have)

- A pioneer profile with receipts: has led a team through sustained ambiguity and pace without breaking — and can tell you how they stayed steady and who grew behind them
- A multiplier, not a pure IC: brilliant engineers who work alone need not apply — evidence of developing engineers into leaders and raising a team's standard
- 10+ years in software or cloud engineering, leading engineers who deliver for customers; deep hands-on AWS depth — credible on the hardest question without a hand-off
- Has built, shipped, and operated agentic or AI systems in production: what you shipped, how you verified it, what it replaced
- Founder, founding engineer, or equivalent zero-to-one experience; demonstrated commercial engagement with the responsiveness of owning a number

Preferred (nice-to-have)

- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional or DevOps Engineer – Professional — useful depth, not a bar
- Consultancy or MSP delivery background: milestones, SOWs, margin, utilization
- Data and AI platform depth (Bedrock, SageMaker, lakehouse) or security and compliance depth (SOC 2, regulated industries)
- Experience with AWS partner programs — competencies, funded programs, ACE — from the delivery side

Competencies / Core Skills

Pioneer durability — doesn't break in the unknown · Talent multiplier — builds the people behind them · Comms & nuance — clear under pressure · Founder range — architect, seller, builder, leader · AI-native builder — agents as standard, evals as proof · Subject-matter depth — the hardest question, answered · Delivery discipline — verified and billed · Commercial presence — priced, followed up, closed

All job descriptions are subject to change based on company needs.

📌 Director of Engineering (Canada)
🏢 VeUP
📍 Canada