VP of Engineering

Join to apply for the VP of Engineering role at Hey Orca

Join to apply for the VP of Engineering role at Hey Orca

Location:Remote (Eastern time - Newfoundland time), Canada

Reports to:CEO

Salary:$180K -$220k CAD/year + options

About Hey Orca

Hey Orca is a social media management tool built for teams and agencies. We help social media managers create, collaborate, and publish content that builds engaged communities. We’re profitable, and growing — and we’re looking for a hands-on Engineering leader to help us scale to the next level.

The Role

As VP of Engineering, you will lead, grow, and inspire our engineering team while staying close to the code and architecture. You’ll shape our technical vision, build scalable systems, and create an environment where developers can do their best work. Your focus will be on people leadership—coaching, supporting, and building a strong team—while guiding the technical direction that takes us to the next level.

Ideal for someone who thrives on guiding teams while staying engaged with the technical challenges of a growing SaaS platform.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and grow engineering managers, tech leads, and senior ICs.
• Own team structure, hiring plans, performance management, and career progression.
• Foster a culture of learning, ownership, and accountability where people are supported and challenged to grow.
• Coach managers and senior ICs to build leadership depth within the team.

Technical Vision & Hands-On Leadership

• Set and maintain a long-term technical vision that balances the development of new features with systems maintenance and improvements to ensure the overall health of the product and codebases.
• Stay engaged with code and architecture: review designs, contribute to technical decisions, and occasionally code for complex or critical initiatives.
• Partner with principal developers to maintain technical excellence and system health (performance, scalability, and maintainability).
• Oversee key architectural decisions for our SaaS platform to ensure scalability, reliability, and performance.
• Oversee security, data privacy, and compliance (e.g., GDPR, SOC2 readiness).

Execution & Delivery

• Own engineering-wide planning cadences, rituals, retrospectives, and key processes such as quality assurance and release mechanisms.
• Define and track engineering OKRs and KPIs to inform decision-making.

Process & Organizational Design

• Design the engineering org to scale with the product and business (e.g., structure, leadership bench, hiring plans).
• Continuously evolve processes to improve velocity, communication, and clarity across teams.
• Encourage experimentation and the adoption of new tools, frameworks, and approaches where they add value.
• Build a culture of continuous learning — supporting mentorship, knowledge-sharing, and skill development for engineers at all levels.

Cross-Functional & Executive Collaboration

• Partner closely with Product and the CEO to align technical priorities with business goals.
• Communicate technical strategy, progress, and challenges to executives, the board, and (when needed) customers.
• Act as a bridge between engineering and business, translating technical realities into clear business impact.
• Own uptime, incident response, and operational resilience in partnership with leads.
• Promote modern Dev Ops practices and automation to improve deployment speed, system reliability, and team efficiency.

What We're Looking For

• Proven experience leading engineering teams and developing leaders in a SaaS company (ideally at the Director or Senior Engineering Manager level).
• Hands-on technical depth — able to review architecture, guide design trade-offs, and (when needed) contribute code.
• Experience scaling a multi-tenant B2B SaaS platform (bonus if familiar with agency-focused or collaboration tools).
• Strong background in modern web development stacks (e.g., React, Node.js, Laravel/PHP, AWS).
• Demonstrated success in scaling teams, processes, and technical platforms for growth.
• Passion for people development — you care deeply about mentoring engineers and helping managers become great leaders.
• Excellent cross-functional collaboration skills; you can partner with product, and…