I'm hiring a VP of Engineering

(2/22/2010 - we've hired our new VP of Engineering and he started this morning.  Thanks to everyone who emailed or helped in the search.  I do appreciate it!  -- Terry)

How would you like to start the new year with a new job?  I'm looking for a VP of Engineering to join us at Gold Systems. Our expectations are high, because we don't trust our people to just anyone who walks through the door.  It really does start with people - we have a great group of people and the new VP has to understand that we have to treat them right if we expect them to treat our customers right.  Customers expect us to deliver the very best technology and software that always works and is easy to use.  (And when it doesn't work, they expect us to fix it fast, whether it ends up being our bug or theirs.)  They also expect us to deliver on time and to fit in to their way of building critical applications. 

I'm looking for someone who has written code and met deadlines, and who understands that software is some part art and some part science.  You should be comfortable sitting down with a couple of smart engineers and brainstorming with them about how to solve a problem.  And you have to be humble enough to understand you probably aren't the best coder in the group, but that it's your job to look out for and then find more of the best engineers.  You'll have some customer contact too, so you've got to be able to switch from low-level techie talk to high-level overviews that reassures the customer that they are in good hands.  (Many of our customers are very, very technical, so you can't be too quick to assume who knows what.)

Having a bit of the entrepreneur in you wouldn't hurt either, because everyone at Gold Systems is involved in the business and everyone on the leadership team is a part of making it work.  It's OK if you don't understand how to read an income statement, we can teach you that, but you do have to want to understand the entire system at some level, not just the software development piece.

Gold Systems is known in the industry for IVR and speech recognition applications, but our market is expanding as we do more Unified Communications.  The last time I looked we had 11 of the Fortune 20 as customers.  We were one of the first companies to partner with Microsoft on UC deployments and now we're one of the first to build UC applications.  One of your jobs will be to think about the kinds of applications we can create for customers and to help the engineering team expand their capabilities.  You're probably going to need a white board wall in your office - and yes, everyone at Gold Systems still gets their own office.  No cube farms here.

If you think you have the right mix of engineering abilities and leadership skills, and you believe that a company can have a good culture and still do well as a business, then email me your resume.  If you do email me, mention this blog post and I'll respond and let you know that I received it.  Thanks!

Terry ([email protected])

(For everyone who knows Matt, he's decided to step back into a pure technical role.  He's done a great job of leading the team through some tough economic times and he's ready to let someone else take it on.)