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The VP Engineering role is a senior executive position reporting to the CTO. The position includes responsibility for recruiting, structuring, and managing a world-class global engineering team headquartered in London but growing to include hubs in NYC and Tokyo. The position may be based in NYC (where the CEO is based) or London, although candidates will be required to spend sufficient time in London to manage a transition to a multi-homed, focused, and effective IT organization.

Launch and Expansion

In little over a year of operation, a Hailo hail is accepted around the world every five seconds from Hailo’s global network of 25,000 drivers and hundreds of thousands of passengers. Launched in November 2011, Hailo is available in London, Dublin, Toronto, Chicago and Boston - and coming next to New York, Tokyo, Washington DC, Madrid and Barcelona. Sales exceed $100M and the consumer and driver appetite for Hailo is unstoppable.

Investment

Hailo has raised over $50M from the best investors anywhere, including Union Square Ventures, Accel Partners, Wellington Partners, Atomico Ventures, Sir Richard Branson, top Japanese telco KDDI, and Janice, our CEO's mother.

In 2012, Hailo raised $30.6M in a Series B financing led by USV. In conjunction with the funding, the company expands to Tokyo, in partnership with new investor KDDI, a Japanese telecom company. The company hired Kiyotaka Fujii, formerly of SAP and LVMH, to lead the firms push into Japan and Asia, as well as Tom Barr, former head of Starbucks’ Coffee Business, as its US President and COO.

How We See Ourselves and Your Challenge

We see ourselves first and foremost as a technology development business, building a global, real-time resource matching and exception-management platform. We dream of adding 9s to our on-time pickup and overall satisfaction indices and automating management of even the wildest of exceptions. To do this, we need to push the limits of smartphones, supporting infrastructure, real-time optimization algorithms, voice interaction, large-scale data analysis, travel time and demand forecasting − the works. We are passionate about the mass distribution network we are building – and how much more we could do with it than just arranging transportation. We do all of this in the context of simultaneously building a real business,

The Role

The VP Engineering reports to the CTO. He or she will be their right hand, working closely with them in all aspects of design and delivery.

The position is global in scope and includes responsibility for recruiting, structuring, and managing a global engineering team headquartered in London but growing to include hubs in NYC and London. The position may be based in NYC (where the CEO is based) or London, although candidates will be required to spend significant time in London to start. Ultimately success will be creating a world-class, cohesive, and effective global engineering team. Fast.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the technical design and delivery of all Hailo’s technology and systems including:
  • Apps – driver and passenger
  • Infrastructure – backend systems including real-time communications, optimization, transactions/payment, and service recovery
  • R+D – data, algorithms, next-generation interfaces
  • Internal tools - insight, accounting, reconciliation, communications
  • Marketing and CRM/Support – driver and customer recruitment and retention tools (incl. Web and Salesforce)
• Lead the Development Team on technical design, architecture and process across multiple location
  • Put your hard-earned gravitas to work to get the most out of our development team – help them push themselves to achieve beyond what they ever dreamed possible
  • Catalyze a culture of innovation, outside-the-box thinking, and technical and research-oriented solutions to hard operational problems
  • Create an environment that attracts intelligent, curious, and creative engineers across varied disciplines
  • Ensure technology always leads the organization and pushes it forward, rather than becoming a bottleneck which holds back ideas and progress
  • Develop and maintain the product roadmap, working closely with the VP of Product and senior executive team
• Instill best practice, particularly around continuous integration, sensible agile development, and issue tracking (we use JIRA Studio)
• Contribute to and shape the product through your own ideas and those fed through the product management process
• Ensuring a forever current and flexible platform to meet the rapidly changing needs of the business, and to service the new ideas which just might be the foundation for future growth
• Build a scalable and robust, global infrastructure and organization
• Grow a base team in London; build a potential second location in NYC, made up of only the best
• Ensure Hailo’s infrastructure is robust, scalable, flexible, and timeless

Requirements

• Relevant degree/masters from a top university
• 10+ years experience leading international development and QA teams providing large scale, global mobile or Internet services
• Experience managing a global in-house, world-class engineering team
• Intense exposure or experience in mobile or web applications
• Demonstrable experience building applications and infrastructures for a global audience
• A programming/engineering background and still a coder at heart
• Experience working in a startup or early stage business, preferably as a founder
• Proven experience managing a team of 100+ and of scaling a business to 250+ technology staff
• Thrive in fast-paced, always-changing, unstructured environments
• Knack for creating order in chaos, and for managing the organizational and process change of a business that needs to grow up fast while retaining our running-in-the-halls startup ethos
• Fun-loving, high-energy, driven, possibly with an offbeat demeano

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