VP of Engineering

Research data is wild. It pours in from brain scans, genome sequencing, EEG and eye-tracking, biospecimens and wearables that track sleep and movement, across dozens of sites and years of study. Lasso Informatics ropes it in: our platform pulls it all into one place so researchers around the world can stop fighting with their data and get to discoveries faster.

That is where our name comes from. A lasso brings something wild under control, and that is the job. The people who do it are Wranglers, and we are quite choosy about who earns the title. Wranglers expect a lot of themselves, make everyone around them better and never stop learning. We move fast, we have fun and we keep the bar high.

What Lasso Offers

• Competitive salary with a performance bonus tied to delivery and team outcomes.
• Group benefits plan and group retirement savings plan with a 2% employer match.
• Hybrid work for Montreal- or Minneapolis-based teams, in office Tuesday through Thursday (fully remote possible outside those areas).
• A senior leadership seat with ownership of the development group and a direct line to the CTO and executive team.
• The chance to shape the architecture and team behind a platform used by thousands of researchers across North America and Europe.

About the Role

Lasso Informatics is hiring a VP of Engineering to lead the engineering group that builds and operates our research data management platform. Reporting to the CTO, you will lead how the platform is designed, built and delivered, and you will be the senior technical authority for the engineering group day to day.

This is a broad, high-ownership role. You will contribute at the level of architecture and direction as well as run delivery, and you will design and evolve the team's structure as headcount scales. You will stay technical enough to hold the respect of strong developers and to step into hard problems yourself.

As a member of senior leadership, the researchers we collaborate with and the families behind their data are your daily compass and top priority. When something breaks, they are the reason you drop everything to fix it: children with significant health issues spend hours in an MRI scanner to advance this research, families give their time hoping it helps another family down the line. To ensure their valuable time was well spent, the data has to come out clean, safe and secure.

You own the budget for the units under your purview. You work with the CEO to scope and price quotes for prospective clients. Deadlines are tight, so you must have a strong sense of urgency and accountability for the health and growth of the company.

You set the standard for AI-native engineering practice across the development team with appropriate guardrails for security and quality, and you model this yourself, continuously evaluating emerging tools and ensuring their effective adoption.

What You Will Do

Organizational and Technical Leadership

• Act as the senior technical authority for day-to-day development decisions and as a trusted partner to the CTO on strategy and vision.
• Lead the development group end to end, owning technical direction of the Lasso platform in close collaboration with the CTO.
• Design and evolve the team's structure as headcount scales.
• Set the standard for AI-native engineering practice, balancing efficiency with guardrails for security, compliance and quality.
• See around corners on technology choices, anticipating scaling and integration needs before they become blockers.
• Own standards for code quality, testing and documentation across the development teams and with the architects.

Team Leadership and People Management

• Lead, grow, mentor and motivate team members. Run one-on-ones, set clear goals, give regular feedback and own performance management.
• Foster accountability and shipping high-quality work on time. Resolve conflict, unblock the team and keep things moving.

Delivery and Program Accountability

• Own end-to-end delivery: planning, prioritization and execution against committed timelines.
• Translate requirements from Platform Architecture, Solution Architecture and product into technical roadmaps and a clear, sequenced plan of work.
• Carry functional accountability for platform delivery on major client deliverables, including data coordinating centres.
• Track progress, raise risks early and keep delivery predictable and transparent.
• Establish and refine processes (Agile, hybrid) that fit the team and the company's stage of growth.

Architecture, Engineering Excellence and Operations

• Work with the architecture teams to implement the technical roadmap; manage technical debt deliberately against long-term maintainability.
• Stay technically current and go deep where needed: design, AI, critical-path work, complex problems and production issues.
• Build and evolve internal engineering platforms, shared libraries, frameworks and self-service capabilities that reduce duplication and speed up delivery.
• Drive automation across development, testing, deployment and operational workflows so engineers focus on high-value work.
• Define and monitor engineering productivity metrics to find bottlenecks and improve delivery performance.
• Establish documentation standards so architecture, APIs, practices and workflows stay accurate and discoverable.
• Build a team culture where operational risk is caught before it becomes a client incident. Partner with Security and Cloud Operations on incident response and root cause analysis.
• Hold responsibility for the Development team's contribution to platform quality and reliability, including the integrity and security of highly sensitive research data.

Product, Client and Executive Collaboration

• Partner with product and leadership on the roadmap. Represent engineering in collaborator, partner and internal meetings.
• Work with the CEO to scope and price quotes for prospective clients, turning around technical input fast against tight deadlines.
• Own the budget for the units under your purview, and be a dependable senior point of accountability for engineering commitments.

What We Are Looking For

Required

• 15+ years in software engineering, including substantial time owning architecture and several years leading and scaling engineering teams.
• Has run an engineering team or function end to end, with full accountability for delivery, quality, people and operations.
• Expert, hands‑on technical depth: a strong coder and systems architect whom engineers trust, who can go deep to unblock the team.
• Demonstrated ability to design systems that scale and to see around corners on architecture and integration.
• Has shipped LLM‑integrated features, works with agentic coding tools as a matter of course and can architect AI capabilities that are reliable, observable and auditable in a regulated data environment.
• Comfortable operating as the most senior technical person in the room, with autonomy and judgment to run your area of accountability.
• Experience scaling a development group through a high‑growth SaaS inflection point, past initial product‑market fit into multi‑program, multi‑client complexity.
• Excellent communication; works credibly with executives, collaborators and engineers and translates between them.
• Solid grounding in cloud architecture (AWS and GCP), RESTful APIs, CI/CD and observability practices.
• Demonstrated success improving engineering effectiveness through developer tooling, CI/CD optimization, automation, documentation and AI‑assisted development practices.
• Comfortable owning a budget and scoping and pricing client deals fast under deadline pressure.
• Experience meeting and maintaining security and compliance requirements (NIST 800‑53 Moderate, HIPAA, SOC 2, PIPEDA, GDPR as applicable).
• Legally authorized to work in Canada or the US.

Strongly Preferred

• Experience in health care, life sciences, research data or another regulated, compliance‑driven domain.
• Familiarity with data engineering and integration patterns (ETL/ELT, BPMN workflow engines such as Camunda, event‑driven systems, messaging).
• Hands‑on with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes), infrastructure as code (Terraform) and observability tooling (Datadog or Splunk).
• Familiarity with secure research or compute environments and authentication frameworks such as OpenOnDemand.
• Experience leading engineering teams across multiple time zones or geographies.
• Functional ability in French, given Lasso's Quebec operations.

Technical Environment

• Cloud and operations: AWS and GCP, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, Datadog, CI/CD.
• Research compute: RStudio, Jupyter, MATLAB, Apptainer (Singularity), DataLad, GPU‑enabled workloads. Security and compliance: NIST 800‑53 Moderate, HIPAA, SOC 2, PIPEDA, GDPR as applicable.

Salary band: $175,000 - $200,000 CAD (US band available upon request)