Vice President of Technology

VP Technology

Location: Hybrid – Commute to Toronto Office

Team: Engineering

Type: Full-time

Compensation: $130,000 to $150,000

About Variablegrid

What does an Energy Abundant Future look like to you?

Variablegrid builds hardware-enabled software systems that optimize power use in homes and commercial buildings. We specialize in intelligent energy management with real-time control of flexible electrical loads. We are expanding our engineering leadership to take the product and platform to the next level.

The Opportunity

We’re looking for a VP of Technology to lead the evolution of our system architecture and own day-to-day software development. This is a highly impactful role that blends technical leadership with hands-on engineering. You will be expected to ship code. You’ll help shape the future of electrified infrastructure, working across hardware, firmware, and cloud layers to deliver real-world energy solutions.

This role is ideal for someone who wants to build and lead a small but capable team, while remaining deeply technical and involved in execution.

What You’ll Do

• Drive the end-to-end platform roadmap: Work closely with the CEO and dev team to define the technical vision. Translate business needs into scalable platform architecture and lead the design of modular, extensible systems that can support evolving product requirements.

• Engineer across the full stack: Guide system-wide development across embedded firmware, secure communications, and backend services. Develop robust OTA pipelines, telemetry frameworks, and real-time APIs for EVSE and DER control.

• Build and deploy AI tooling that improves execution: Design and ship Claude-powered developer workflows and agentic systems that accelerate debugging, testing, release readiness, support triage, and internal automation.

What We’re Looking For

• End-to-end systems builder with production track record: You’ve architected and delivered complex products that span embedded firmware, device networking, and cloud services, ideally in connected hardware or IoT environments.

• Proven Claude development experience: You have shipped real systems using Claude in production or near-production settings, with clear examples of prompting, tool use, evaluation, and iteration.

• Proven agent-building experience: You have built and deployed agents (multi-step workflows with tool access, memory/state, guardrails, and monitoring), not just single-shot prompts or demos.

• Cloud engineering skills: Experience building resilient backend systems with Java (or similar), AWS infrastructure (Greengrass, Lambda, etc.), and event-driven data pipelines. Comfortable designing and scaling device management backends.

• Protocol and systems integration: Ideally familiar with EV charging standards like OCPP.d

• Deep embedded systems expertise: Background in Linux, cross-compilation, and kernel-level debugging. Able to optimize performance under constrained compute and memory resources.

• Mobile and data layer awareness: While the core of the role is system architecture and backend integration, our stack also includes Flutter-based mobile applications.

• Leadership through systems thinking: This role starts hands-on but will evolve into guiding product owners, developers, and partners as the company grows.

• Startup-ready execution: Bias for ownership and iteration. Comfortable in fast-moving environments with limited structure.

• Broad systems builder, not just embedded specialist: You’re comfortable moving between embedded systems, backend services, mobile apps, and databases, with an eye toward how the entire platform fits together. You architect for scale and reliability, not just for the next sprint.

Why Join Us?

• Build the future of electrification: Your work will directly shape how homes, buildings, and vehicles consume and share energy. This isn’t incremental software, its core infrastructure for an energy abundant future.

• Foundational role in a growing company: Join at a stage where your architectural decisions and leadership will define the product, the team, and the company’s trajectory.

• Real ownership and upside: Competitive compensation, meaningful equity, and the opportunity to grow into senior leadership.

• Mission-driven team: We’re accelerating the electrification of society. If you want your work to matter in the fight against climate change, you’ll feel at home here.

Interested or know someone great?

We’re actively hiring and would love to hear from you. Reach out directly or send candidates our way.