VP of Engineering

🚀 We’re on a mission to make real estate transactions smarter, faster, and friction-free.

🏢 Real estate is the world’s largest asset class, yet the legal processes and tools behind it remain slow, manual, and underinvested. Lawyers must review dense documents line by line and piece together information across silos, all while clients demand faster, more transparent due diligence.

🤖 That's where we come in. Orbital Copilot is the AI assistant built exclusively for commercial real estate law. Developed with former practicing real estate lawyers, it accelerates complex due diligence by up to 70% while delivering legal-grade precision.

🤝 We're trusted by leading firms like Goodwin and BCLP to remove the busywork so legal teams can focus on what they do best: applying sharp legal judgment, delivering standout client service, and getting deals over the line faster.

💡 Working at Orbital means joining a team that's reimagining how real estate transactions get done - moving fast, working collaboratively, and giving people the ownership to make a real impact from day one.

Requirements

Until now, our CTO (Andrew) has acted as the most senior leader for the engineering function at Orbital. But with multiple squads, rapidly expanding agentic AI capabilities, aggressive US GTM expansion, and ARR targets doubling annually, our engineering organisation needs to scale with far greater clarity, structure, and leadership.

We need a VP of Engineering who has:

• Is deeply AGI-pilled: You have a strong conviction about the transformative power of advanced AI systems and agentic workflows. You obsess over model capabilities today and in the future, evals, and emerging architectures. You also bring an opinionated worldview into engineering strategy.

• Been here before: You’ve scaled engineering teams at high-growth SaaS companies from Series A/B → C+, managing 50+ engineers across multiple squads, disciplines, and leadership layers. You know what breaks, what matters, and how to fix it.

• Architectural depth at scale: You’ve designed and evolved complex distributed systems, data pipelines, and AI/ML-enabled architectures that support rapid growth and enterprise customers.

• Introduced structure without killing startup speed: You know how to create engineering processes and best practices that increase velocity not bureaucracy.

• Balanced innovation and delivery: You’ve shipped mission-critical products while maintaining strong engineering fundamentals.

• Stayed close to the metal: You still tinker. You know Python. You can read code, evaluate designs, and challenge architectural decisions even if leadership is your primary role.

• The conviction and charisma to sell ideas: You influence the exec team, inspire engineers, and build alignment around the right technical direction.

This isn’t about reinventing our platform overnight. It’s about building the engineering excellence, leadership depth, architectural clarity, and operating rhythm required for Orbital to scale globally.

🙌 What You Get To Do

Engineering Strategy & Architecture

• Own and evolve Orbital’s end-to-end technical architecture to support global scale, reliability, and rapid iteration.

• Champion an AGI-pilled engineering vision that leverages cutting-edge model capabilities, autonomous workflows, and agentic systems along with promoting the use of internal AI coding tools so every engineer and non-engineer is 10x'ing their token usage.

• Make foundational architectural decisions across backend, frontend, infra, data, and ML systems.

• Establish engineering-wide standards around security, observability, quality, and operational excellence.

• Ensure engineering systems scale as ARR and usage grows exponentially

Execution & Delivery

• Build the systems and processes to ensure predictable execution across many autonomous and cross-functional squads.

• Increase engineering velocity through better tooling, automation, and architectural simplification.

• Balance short-term needs with long-term technical investments.

• Maintain a strong handle on tech debt and reliability across mission-critical workflows.

• Strengthen CI/CD, on-call performance, and engineering quality culture.

Team Leadership & Scaling

• Lead and grow an engineering organisation of 50+ engineers, hiring exceptional managers and ICs.

• Build a scalable engineering org structure over the next 12 months with clear roles, expectations, and accountability.

• Mentor and develop engineering leaders, fostering a culture of ownership, technical excellence, and high trust.

• Empower teams to operate autonomously while maintaining alignment on architectural and strategic goals.

Cross-Functional Leadership / Collaboration

• Act as the “voice of Engineering” within the exec team, partnering closely with Product, AI, Legal Engineering, and GTM stakeholders.

• Collaborate with Product to translate strategy into realistic engineering plans and technical trade-offs.

• Work with GTM teams to support enterprise requirements, integrations, scalability, and security.

• Build strong bridges between Engineering ↔ AI ↔ Product, smoothing friction and aligning teams around impact.

Thought Partnership

• Serve as a key thought partner to the CTO, VP of AI, VP of Product and Head of Legal Engineering.

• Bring external perspective from previous scaling journeys, challenging assumptions with sound reasoning and experience. Come to the table with strong opinions, weakly held.

• Contribute to Orbital’s long-term technical vision, especially around agentic workflows, automation, and next-gen real estate legal AI systems.

👀 What We’re Looking For

Must-Haves

• AGI-pilled mindset with conviction about AI’s transformative impact and a desire to motivate others to adopt a similar mindset.

• Proven experience scaling engineering organisations from Series A/B → C+, managing 50+ engineers across multiple managers and squads.

• Deep architectural and systems-thinking expertise — ideally in distributed systems, cloud infra, AI/ML pipelines, and B2B SaaS platforms.

• Strong technical background (Python preferred) with the ability to review code and evaluate technical designs.

• Experience working with AI/ML-enabled products, ideally agentic systems or complex model-in-the-loop architectures.

• Excellent leadership and team-building capabilities; you’ve hired, coached, and scaled engineering managers and high-performing ICs.

• Strong communicator able to influence exec peers and motivate engineering teams.

• Comfortable being a thought partner and challenger to the CTO.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience in LegalTech, PropTech, or other regulated or data-sensitive industries.

• STEM background (preferred, not required).

• Experience scaling SaaS in the US market.

• Experience building systems where trust, security, and explainability matter.

Benefits

• Matched pension contributions and equity options in a fast-growing startup

• Flexible working hours and hybrid location

• 25 days paid holiday (plus bank holidays)

• Professional equipment and a personal development budget

• Training opportunities to learn and grow

• Cycle-to-work scheme

🔒 Security is everyone’s responsibility at Orbital. We ask all team members to follow our security policies, complete regular awareness training, and handle sensitive data with care in line with ISO 27001 standards. Spot something unusual? Reporting risks or incidents quickly helps us maintain the strong culture of security and compliance we all depend on.

💡 At Orbital, we’re committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. We especially welcome applications from people who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. Even if you don’t meet every single requirement, or if the right role isn’t listed yet, we’d still love to hear from you.

💰 This hiring range is a reasonable estimate of the base pay range for this position at the time of posting. Pay is based on several factors, which may include job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and business requirements.