VP, Engineering

The mission

The marine industry runs on clipboards, phone calls, and software from the 90s. Marinas manage millions in revenue through spreadsheets. Boaters call ahead and hope for the best. An entire economy—one that touches coastal communities, family businesses, and a way of life—operates without the infrastructure it deserves.

Dockwa is changing that. We're building the operating system for everything that floats.

We've spent a decade earning the trust of marinas and boaters across North America. We're now the system of record for thousands of marinas and the booking platform for hundreds of thousands of boaters. Every transaction, reservation, fuel purchase, and contract flows through our platform—creating the data layer that will power the next generation of marine commerce.

We need a VP of Engineering to build the team and technology that turns this foundation into something transformational.

This is an inflection point. We've proven product-market fit. We've built the network. We've established category leadership. Now we need to evolve from a marina management tool into the intelligence layer for an entire industry.

That means shipping new products faster. Scaling our payments infrastructure globally. Building AI‑powered capabilities that help marinas optimize yield, manage operations, and make better decisions. Creating platform APIs that third parties build on top of.

The technical challenges are real: multi‑side marketplaces, embedded payments, dynamic pricing, international expansion, and data products that monetize a decade of transaction history. You'll need to solve these while scaling a lean engineering organization that has always punched above its weight.

This isn't a role for someone who wants to optimize an existing machine. It's for someone who wants to build the machine that captures a massive market before anyone else figures out it exists.

You'll inherit a small, talented R&D team and a proven Engineering Lead who knows the codebase and the domain. Your job is to scale this team thoughtfully—adding senior ICs and leads who can own problems end-to-end, building a pod structure that aligns with our product bets, and creating a remote‑first culture where great engineers want to stay and grow.

We don't need process for process's sake. We need an organization that maintains velocity and quality as it grows.

Our growth comes from three interconnected bets:

• Marina Platform:
  The core system of record. New modules, deeper payments integration, and tools that make Dockwa indispensable to marina operations.
• Boater Products:
  The demand engine. A consumer app and subscription product that drives bookings, transactions, and loyalty across the network.
• Platform & Intelligence:
  The future. APIs that partners integrate with, data products that serve insurers and investors, and AI capabilities that optimize everything from pricing to procurement.

You'll own the technical strategy across all three—making the right tradeoffs, sequencing the right bets, and ensuring the architecture supports where we're going, not just where we are.

Payments isn't a feature at Dockwa—it's the business model. Every module we ship, every marina we onboard, every boater interaction creates payment volume. Your job is to scale this infrastructure: improving reliability, expanding internationally, and building the rails for transaction types we haven't launched yet.

A small team shipping daily requires excellent fundamentals: CI/CD that works, observability that catches problems before customers do, incident response that resolves issues fast. You'll own our security posture and ensure we can grow without fragility.

You've scaled an engineering organization in a high‑growth environment. You've shipped products that drove real business outcomes, not just technical milestones. You've done this with capital efficiency—getting outsized output without unlimited headcount.