VP of Engineering

Company

Sante is the complete operating system for the $550B community retail market; convenience, independent grocery, liquor stores. We’ve started with liquor stores, and we’ve emerged as the industry-leader in just two years by helping these SMBs generate more revenue with our in-store POS, eComm, marketing platform and agents that help with essential, everyday tasks like phone orders and inventory receiving.

These retail businesses are cornerstones of our communities, bringing cultures and flavors from around the world to Main St. near you. They give our neighborhoods a sense of identity that corporate chains will drown out if they take marketshare from these SMBs that exist to serve locals.

We’re delivering best-in-class technology to hundreds of customers, processing $500M+ in annual card volume. With usage around the clock, Santé is the most important software our customers use. It is their lifeline to accepting sales, managing inventory, tracking employees and keeping up with their P&L.

Santé is backed by top investors like Y-Combinator, Bonfire Ventures, Operator Collective, Veridical Ventures and UpHonest Capital.

We are in growth mode now. We 4x’d in 2025, and we will 10x this year. If you are fulfilled by ownership and a life-changing outcome, let’s connect. We’ll show you why Santé is the right bet for the next chapter in your career.

Role

We are looking for an experienced, relentless tech lead to join us as our VP of Engineering.

You will partner directly with the Founder on building a $B company by leading our engineering team to develop the best system in retail.

You will build the category-defining operating system for physical retail stores that will replace generic, outdated platforms by using AI agents to help small business owners cut operational costs and generate more revenue.

Our product spans checkout in-store, eComm for website building, delivery app management, email & SMS marketing and agents that empower these business owners to operate more efficiently.

In this role, you will:

• Recruit top-tier talent to join our winning team
• Raise our bar for excellence by pushing your team to strike the balance between speed and reliable product
• Architect the product to sustain the intense, daily demand on our product and support our ambitious growth targets for years to come
• Maintain best-in-class uptime and operational excellence for our core POS payments product
• Partner closely with our founder / CEO on the product roadmap and serve as a key thought partner. Our roadmap includes building agents into workflows for our customers and embedding fintech throughout the app (e.g. instant funding, ACH for B2B payments, payroll)
• Ensure our team is utilizing the latest AI-coding tools and workflows, and AI is built into everything we do

Requirements

• 8+ years of full-time engineering experience
• Experience managing and scaling team of 10+ engineers
• Background in hypergrowth startups, ideally with experience operating at a startup during at Seed through Series C or experience as a founder
• Business-minded prioritization: you know when to opt for speed and when to double-down on foundational architecture
• Experience working with payments systems at scale
• Significant experience with cloud-based applications (AWS RDS Aurora, Lambda, Snowflake, SQS, S3)
• Implemented efficient CI/CD pipelines for automated testing (we use GitHub Actions)
• Meaningful web app experience, preferably within Node.js (we use Typescript and Next.js with tRPC)
• Eager to work at our Flatiron (NYC) office 5 days / week

Why Santé?

• We are supporting independent retail businesses that are critical to local economies across the country. The product is being pulled out of our hands, and we cannot build it fast enough to support the demand for Santé
• You will earn seed stage equity in a business that has been significantly de-risked
• We have clarity on what we need to do to win. We are in growth mode, not testing the waters to see what works. Our customers are bought in, and we are already working with some of the top independent retailers in the country
• We have proven that we can build better software than everything available in market, and we can win consistently against all of our competitors
• We are building for business owners in an enduring, recession-proof industry that has to exist. The challenges holding our customers back need to be solved, regardless of what changes with technology or investor sentiment
• We care deeply about our customers and understand the responsibility we’ve taken on to serve them with a platform that they use to run every aspect of their business. We do not take this opportunity for granted, and we are serious about delivering for the business owners that trust us
• We are invested in our team, paying competitive salaries, providing unlimited PTO and great benefits like vision, dental, medical 401k, transportation and more
• You will work with the most talented engineers and GTM pros in the NYC startups scene

Why you shouldn’t work with us

• You are not excited to work in-person

• You do not want to spend a lot of your time recruiting elite talent to join your team

• You cannot put in the hard work to build a $B business

• You are not excited to serve our customers or solve problems in our space

• You do not like talking to customers

• You do not ship high quality code, fast

Interview process

• Meeting with CEO
• Meeting with our Founding Engineer
• Systems design session with the Eng team
• Offer