Vice President Engineering Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

UnitedMasters is building the world's most powerful marketplace connecting artists, brands, and fans-empowering over 1.5M independent artists to earn, grow, and own their future. We've reinvented music distribution by putting artists first: enabling emerging creators to distribute directly to DSPs while maintaining ownership of their masters and up to 100% of royalties.

Our team is a diverse group of engineers, designers, product thinkers, and storytellers united by a shared mission to help artists succeed on their own terms. We combine deep expertise in technology, music, and culture to build products that unlock opportunity for creators everywhere. With a collaborative, creator-led mindset, we work closely with Translation, our in-house creative agency-to drive innovation at the intersection of culture and tech.

Backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Alphabet (Google), Apple, and Disney, we are scaling rapidly across our B2C subscription business and Indie Label B2B platform.

UnitedMasters is seeking a Vice President of Engineering to lead and scale an engineering organization across backend, mobile (iOS/Android), web, data, QA, DevOps. This leader will drive the architectural vision, delivery excellence, and technical culture behind our consumer subscription products and our growing B2B indie label business.

A core mandate of this role is leveraging AI to enhance both artist  experience and engineering productivity. You will champion AI-driven personalization, artist tools, recommendations, and automation while also deploying AI-enabled development tooling, test automation, and ML-driven operations to improve engineering velocity and quality.

This is a hands-on, build-it-from-the-ground-up mandate. A top first-year priority is establishing UnitedMasters' "paved path" for agentic software development: defining the agentic-development methodology, making the core architecture and tooling decisions, setting context and documentation standards, standing up the eval and safety framework, coaching engineers through adoption, and demonstrating measurable developer-productivity gains. We're looking for someone who has personally built these capabilities, not sponsored or inherited them from a central platform team.

This role is ideal for a systems-level thinker, an inspiring people leader, and an operator who thrives in a fast-moving, culture-driven environment.

• Define the multi-year technical and AI strategy across the UnitedMasters product ecosystem, championing new technologies, especially AI/ML, automation, and mobile innovation, to drive continuous improvement.
• Build AI-powered customer-facing capabilities: artist insights, content recommendations, automated marketing, distribution optimization, and ML-driven discovery, monetization, and predictive tools.
• Deliver measurable improvements from AI-enabled engineering, including gains in delivery speed, cycle time, and quality through capabilities such as code generation, automated testing, code review, debugging, and engineering operations automation.
• Create and scale the paved path for AI-assisted and agentic software development across engineering: define the methodology and repeatable end-to-end workflows, determine how work is decomposed across sub-agents and tools, select and integrate the tooling, establish the supporting development practices and infrastructure, and drive adoption across the engineering organization.
• Establish the technical foundations for reliable and secure AI agents in UnitedMasters products, including agent architecture, agent memory and state management, context engineering, RAG, tool use, an evaluation framework, human-in-the-loop controls, and defenses against prompt injection, data exfiltration, and other adversarial risks.
• Drive architectural modernization and scale initiatives across our web applications, mobile apps, and internal tech platforms.
• Ensure systems are reliable, performant, secure, and built for global scale.

• Lead, mentor, and develop an engineering organization, including managers, and senior ICs.
• Own engineering competencies, performance systems, and technical excellence standards.
  

• Drive  SDLC practices with strong CI/CD, automated testing, and AI-enabled developer tools.
• Foster an environment where teams experiment and ship quickly, backed by strong measurement and rapid iteration.
• Ensure predictable execution and high-quality delivery across all engineering pods.
• Partner with Product and Design leadership on prioritization, planning, and resource allocation.
• Own engineering commitments and ensure exceptional communication around timelines, risks, and dependencies.
  

• Collaborate closely with Product, Design, Data Science, Revenue, Marketing, and Artist Relations teams.
• Translate business goals into clear, actionable technical plans.
• Improve expectations-setting and visibility with executive stakeholders.

• 12+ years engineering experience with 5+ years leading orgs of 25+ engineers, including managers and senior ICs.
• Proven success as a senior engineering leader at a scaled B2C, marketplace, or subscription-driven technology company.
• Strong technical background with the ability to dive deep into systems architecture, data modeling, mobile performance, and platform-scale challenges.
  Demonstrated experience deploying AI/ML in both customer-facing features and internal engineering workflows.
• Track record of improving engineering velocity and developer experience through tooling, process, and automation.
• Direct, hands-on experience building agentic-development capabilities from the ground up (must-have): methodology, tooling, context standards, and eval/safety frameworks you personally designed and shipped, with measurable developer-productivity gains you drove.
• Exceptional communication skills and experience partnering with product and executive leadership.
  

• Experience with large-scale content distribution, media ingestion pipelines, payments, subscription systems, or rights management.
• Familiarity with Python/Django, JavaScript/TypeScript, Kubernetes, event-driven architecture, or modern mobile frameworks.
• Strong understanding of data science, ML infrastructure, and experimentation platforms.
• Background in creator economy, digital media, or marketplace ecosystems.

• A people-first leader who inspires teams and takes pride in developing others.
• A visionary technologist who sees around corners and builds systems that scale with the business.
• A business-oriented thinker who maps engineering strategy to real outcomes for artists and label partners.
• A decisive operator who thrives in ambiguity and moves with urgency.
• A culture-builder who values collaboration, inclusion, and excellence.

• Lead the engineering organization shaping the future of independent music.
• Build AI-powered products and tools that help artists earn, grow, and be discovered.
• Drive innovation at the intersection of technology, creativity, and culture.
• Make a direct impact on millions of creators around the world.

Salary Hiring Range:  $275K - 310K + bonus opportunity 

Our salary ranges are based on paying competitively for our size and industry, and are one part of many compensation, benefits and other reward opportunities we provide (e.g. in some cases bonus, stock options, 401(k) match, etc.)

Individual pay rate decisions are based on a number of factors, including qualifications for the role, experience level, skillset, and balancing internal equity relative to peers at the company.  We expect the majority of the candidates who are offered roles at our company to fall healthily throughout the range based on these factors. 

The range above is for the expectations as laid out in the job description, however we are often open to a wide variety of profiles, and recognize that the person we hire may be less experienced (or more senior) than this job description as posted.  If that ends up being the case, the updated salary range will be communicated with you as a candidate.

The salary range above is for NY/CA.  As a company, we have a location based strategy, which means the salary range could be lower or higher than this if the role is hired in another location.

About UnitedMasters

UnitedMasters empowers brands and artists to forge authentic connections with audiences at scale by bringing together culture, technology and storytelling. UnitedMasters has taken the bold step of building a music distribution service that, radically, puts artists first-disrupting the legacy music business by letting up-and-coming artists distribute their music directly to fans through streaming services while maintaining ownership of their Masters and up to 100% of royalties. UnitedMasters has over 1.5 million artists on its platform and is growing rapidly. Brands like Diageo, Ally, and ESPN come to UnitedMasters to partner with these artists and play a role in moving culture forward. In the past year, UnitedMasters subscribers have grown rapidly. With $170M raised to date, UnitedMasters is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Apple, Alphabet (aka Google), and Disney amongst others.