VP of Engineering

Director / VP of Engineering
Lead the next era of AI-enabled software delivery at ConsumerAffairs

Most engineering leaders inherit a roadmap. This one gets to redesign how software is made.

ConsumerAffairs is already beyond the “give every developer an AI assistant” stage. AI is embedded in the delivery workflow today: tickets are processed through a system that generates code and pull requests, engineers review the work, QA blends automation and AI with human judgment, and a Python-based triage agent runs every six hours to assess which changes may be safe for greater autonomy.

The foundation is real. The next leap is the opportunity.

We are looking for a Director or VP of Engineering who can lead multiple teams, raise the operating bar, and turn this advanced starting point into a safer, faster and more measurable software-delivery system. You will help create an engineering organization that ships more high-quality work without scaling headcount at the same rate.

Why ConsumerAffairs

ConsumerAffairs helps people make confident decisions during some of life’s most important and expensive purchases. Its platform brings together 10+ million vetted consumer reviews, authoritative buyers guides, personalized matching technology and tools that connect people with brands that fit their needs.

The impact is already substantial. ConsumerAffairs reports that 181 million+ consumers have used its company profiles and reviews for research, while more than 6 million have been connected with a brand suited to them. Behind that reach is an all-cloud consumer platform serving millions of monthly unique users, operating 24/7/365 and expanding the role AI can play in both the customer experience and the way software is delivered.

This is a proven company with a meaningful mission, a high-traffic product and major runway across commerce. Its values are simple: raise the bar, win as a team and care.

The Mandate

You will take ownership of a critical engineering leadership seat within a 30+ person organization. The initial direct remit is expected to flex from approximately 6 to 16 people, depending on whether your scope begins with the consumer web function or expands across a broader part of engineering.

This is a true player-coach role. Roughly 70% of your time will focus on leadership, operating strategy and organizational performance. Around 30% will keep you close enough to architecture, reviews, incidents, AI workflows and technical decisions to command the respect of excellent engineers.

Your mission is to build a well-oiled engineering organization that is deeply integrated with the product, relentlessly improves how it works, and uses AI to produce a high volume of valuable, high-quality software at speed.

What you will achieve
In your first 30 to 60 days

• Learn the business, products, systems, customer journeys and commercial impact of the engineering work.

• Build trust with engineers, managers, product leaders and executive stakeholders.

• Assess the organization, current delivery workflow, technical risks, metrics and talent.

• Understand where the existing AI system is reliable, where it creates rework and where human judgment must remain.

By 90 days

• Own a clear point of view on the organization, team structure and engineering operating model.

• Establish a practical roadmap for stronger product partnership, AI-enabled delivery, measurement and quality.

• Identify the highest-leverage opportunities to improve cycle time without compromising reliability.

• Create clarity around the work that can move toward autonomy and the revenue-sensitive or high-blast-radius work that must stay supervised.

Over six to 12 months

• Turn engineering and product into proactive partners focused on outcomes, not ticket completion.

• Build useful baselines for cycle time per feature, quality, rework, defects, release performance and business value.

• Strengthen automated QA, evals, feedback loops, reusable context, observability and release controls.

• Move selected low-risk work toward safe, evidence-based autonomy while retaining humans where judgment matters.

• Develop the team, raise the talent bar and make the organization faster without creating unnecessary process.

• Create the integrated, efficient engineering machine that allows ConsumerAffairs to ship more high-quality work without proportional headcount growth.

What you will own

• Leadership of multiple engineering teams and concurrent product initiatives.

• The next stage of ConsumerAffairs’ AI-enabled software-delivery operating model.

• Engineering productivity, quality and AI-performance measurement that rewards outcomes rather than vanity metrics.

• A stronger relationship between engineering and product, with engineers understanding the user, use case and business result behind the work.

• Team design, manager development, hiring, performance management and difficult talent decisions when needed.

• Architecture and modernization judgment across a high-traffic, all-cloud consumer platform.

• Operational resilience for a 24/7/365 product, including calm leadership when serious incidents occur.

• Pragmatic decisions about what to build, what to buy and where human approval remains essential.

The environment you will inherit

• Consumer-facing web products built primarily with vanilla JavaScript and CSS.

• Python and Django on the backend.

• Strong page-load performance and a bias toward control, speed and limited third-party bloat.

• A Kanban / Agile hybrid with daily standups and no reliance on story points.

• AI-generated code and pull requests already embedded in the team’s normal workflow.

• Human code review plus a blend of automated, AI-assisted and manual QA.

• A live Python triage agent that evaluates work for risk and potential autonomy every six hours.

• Millions of monthly unique users and a complex, always-on cloud platform.

You do not need to be dogmatic about the current stack. You do need the judgment to understand why the choices were made, what should stay, what should evolve and how to modernize without reaching for an expensive rewrite.

What you bring

• Significant engineering leadership experience, including responsibility for multiple teams, managers or parallel product streams.

• A career foundation as an engineer and current technical credibility as a leader.

• Evidence that you have led a meaningful AI-enabled SDLC transformation, not simply rolled out Copilot, Cursor or another coding assistant.

• Fluency across the delivery loop: intake, context, planning, code generation, pull requests, review, testing, QA, release, monitoring and learning.

• Sound judgment about risk tiers, human-in-the-loop controls, evals, rollback and safe autonomy.

• Experience leading customer-facing consumer, marketplace, D2C, ecommerce or similarly high-velocity software products.

• The ability to lead in a scrappy environment where resources are used thoughtfully and leaders stay close to the work.

• Strong product partnership and the instinct to understand the problem before building the solution.

• A track record of hiring, developing, measuring and, when necessary, changing teams.

• Practical front-end architecture judgment, including JavaScript, CSS, performance, UI / UX and framework tradeoffs.

• A measured approach to engineering effectiveness that balances speed, quality, reliability and business impact.

• Clear communication, a sense of humor, low ego and the confidence to be diplomatic when possible and forceful when necessary.

A computer science degree is not required. Practical depth, learning velocity and the ability to “talk the talk and walk the walk” matter more.

This role is probably not for you if:

• Your AI story is limited to individual tool adoption.

• You want a title but do not want to remain close to architecture and delivery.

• You need a large support structure before you can create progress.

• You default to framework replacement or wholesale rewrites before understanding the product and operating constraints.

• Your leadership background is limited to infrastructure, QA or transformation strategy without broader product-engineering ownership.

• You measure success through lines of code, pull-request volume or tool usage without quality and business counter-metrics.

Why work with Adam Joffe

You will partner closely with Chief Technology Officer Adam Joffe, a builder and operator with more than 30 years of experience across internet services, gaming, fintech, data and consumer platforms.

Adam founded and sold early internet and 3D-animation businesses, helped build EverQuest and led technology at Sony Online Entertainment, served as CIO of Bill Me Later and Vice President of Data Management at PayPal, and held CTO roles at Blurb and Dividend Solar before joining ConsumerAffairs in 2017.

He has already pushed ConsumerAffairs beyond basic AI adoption. He is now looking for a leader who can challenge the current model, make it better and bring the organization with them. Adam values people who ask before assuming, avoid surprises, understand the tradeoff between speed and perfection, and know when to collaborate and when to make the hard call.

This is an opportunity to learn from an accomplished CTO while owning a mandate with genuine room to shape the future.

Role details

• Title: Director or VP of Engineering, based on experience and final scope.

• Location: Remote within the United States, with Central Time as the organization’s main operating center.

• Compensation: Executive-level package with a working base target around $300,000-$400,000. The final base and equity mix will reflect experience, title and scope.

• Work authorization: Visa sponsorship is not anticipated.

• Schedule: Normal working hours are expected. As a senior leader in a 24/7/365 business, you must be available when a serious production incident requires executive attention.

• Interview process: Rocket Talent vetting, an initial conversation with Adam, focused peer conversations, executive meetings with product and company leadership, and a final conversation with Adam. No take-home exercise is currently planned.

Ready to build what comes next?

If you have already changed how engineering teams use AI, know how to make autonomy safe, and still enjoy getting close enough to the work to make the system better, this is the kind of mandate that rarely reaches the market.

Rocket Talent is conducting this search on behalf of ConsumerAffairs. The successful candidate will be employed by ConsumerAffairs, not Rocket Talent.