VP of Engineering – AI-Powered Retail OS for Independent SMBs
New York, NY (On-site, Flatiron – 5 days)
$300–400k Base + Seed-Stage Equity

Company: Storm2’s client is building the category-defining operating system for the $550B community retail market — convenience stores, independent grocers, liquor stores. In two years they’ve become the industry leader in their first vertical, processing $500M+ in annual card volume across hundreds of customers who rely on the platform around the clock to run every aspect of their business.

Backed by Y-Combinator and a strong syndicate of institutional investors, they 4x’d in 2025 and are targeting 10x this year.

Why this role & Why Now

• Product-market fit, proven: Customers are pulling the product out of their hands. The question isn’t whether this works — it’s how fast they can build.
• Recession-proof market: Independent retail has to exist. These businesses are community cornerstones, and the technology serving them has been generic and outdated for decades.
• AI-native roadmap: Agents embedded into day-to-day workflows, fintech layered throughout — instant funding, ACH for B2B payments, payroll. The 2026 buildout is ambitious and well-defined.
• Seed equity, significantly de-risked: The hard validation work is done. This is a rare chance to take early-stage equity into a company already in clear growth mode.

Responsibilities:

• Partner directly with the Founder/CEO on product roadmap and serve as a key technical thought partner
• Scale the engineering team from seed-stage to 20+ engineers within 18 months
• Architect the platform to sustain intense daily demand and support aggressive growth targets for years ahead
• Maintain best-in-class uptime and operational excellence across the core POS and payments product
• Drive the integration of AI agents into customer workflows and the embedding of fintech features throughout the platform
• Own board-level communication — metrics, quarterly wins, risks
• Engage directly with customers to close the feedback loop on product

Qualifications:

• 8+ years full-time engineering experience, with meaningful time inside hypergrowth startups (Seed through Series C) or as a founder
• Experience scaling engineering teams and operating at pace without sacrificing reliability
• Payments systems experience at scale
• Strong cloud-native background — AWS (RDS Aurora, Lambda, SQS, S3), Snowflake
• Hands-on with modern web stacks; Node.js/TypeScript preferred
• Comfortable leading investor-facing and customer-facing conversations

Why apply:

• Seed-stage equity in a business that has already proven it can win
• Direct partnership with the Founder — high ownership, high visibility
• Build on top of genuine PMF in a market that isn’t going anywhere
• Work with a strong engineering and GTM team in one of NYC’s most compelling early-stage startups