At Medium, we believe in the power of words — and we’re on a mission to bring the world’s expertise to life through memorable storytelling. Our platform rewards great writing and puts power back in the hands of readers. Medium’s subscription model means we rely on our members, not ads. We’re looking for teammates who are inspired by our mission, who are deeply thoughtful and empathetic, and who are passionate about the future of online publishing. Sound like you? Keep reading!
Medium is building the best place for reading and writing on the internet—a place where today’s smartest writers, thinkers, experts, and storytellers can share big, interesting ideas; a place where ideas are judged on the value they provide to readers, not the fleeting attention they can attract for advertisers.
We’re looking for a Vice President of Engineering to lead and scale the full scope of engineering at Medium—product, platform, data, and quality. This is a rare opportunity to take a stable, profitable, thoughtfully built company and help lead its next chapter of innovation, performance, and transformation. Reporting directly to the CEO, this role is responsible for technical strategy, delivery, talent development, and engineering culture across the entire org.
Role Overview
As VP of Engineering, you’ll guide the strategic and operational direction of Medium’s engineering organization. You’ll work closely with the CEO, and senior leaders across design, content, and analytics to align the technical roadmap with our product vision and business goals.
You will directly manage our senior-most engineering leaders—across product engineering, infrastructure, data, and QA—while shaping the conditions for them and their teams to thrive. You will be the steward of engineering excellence at Medium: raising the bar on quality, scaling systems and teams with intention, and building the connective tissue between engineering and the rest of the business.
You’ll also lead Medium’s engineering transformation—bringing modern AI tooling into our internal stack and integrating meaningful AI capabilities into our products, in a way that enhances creativity and trust for both writers and readers.
This role requires strong product and strategic thinking, high EQ, technical depth, and a passion for thoughtful, high-ownership culture. You’ll be joining a company that values clarity over complexity, balancing intentionality and urgency. We're a mission-driven organization and our first operating principle is Humans First; we're looking for someone to lead the culture of our engineering team, and to foster a work environment that embraces diversity, inclusion, and equity.
Key Responsibilities
- Manage the engineering team. That is 40 people, including four managers as direct reports (those four people lead product engineering, platform, data science, and QA). We think adding experience does more for capacity than headcount, so expect that scaling headcount isn’t the primary concern. We anticipate going from 40 to 60 over the next two years.
- Grow a product-oriented engineering org. Medium gives senior engineers deep responsibility for product and platform systems design. To do that, we need to build supporting systems for infrastructure, development tools, testing and monitoring, and also recruit within our target engineer type. We’re looking for senior, product-oriented engineers who want to skip big company overhead and focus on building, but without the risk of a startup. We prioritize building an inclusive team with strong mentorship and experienced leaders.
- Navigate the transition to an AI-first engineering org (tools, expectations, staffing, hiring). AI will create opportunities for engineers to rethink best practices, for example, adopting faster prototyping processes to facilitate faster, deeper product insights.
- Architecture. Must be able to weigh in and advise on direction for architectural decisions for both old and new code bases. We do have legacy systems and issues like duplicated features living on different tech stacks. We also have new code bases and zero to one projects that we expect to launch.
- Lead culture to maintain and strengthen our unique organizational values. We are mission-driven, we are kind and constructive, we are pragmatic, we are aiming to master rapid impactful development that ladders into big outcomes.
- Develop and communicate a clear, compelling technical strategy that supports our business in collaboratively developing Medium’s business goals, working with leadership to track progress, and build a culture of achieving those goals.
- Establish high standards for software quality, architecture, testing, and operational excellence across all engineering teams.
- Build systems and processes that enable autonomous teams to ship great work at a sustainable, meaningful pace.
- Attend Medium’s twice-yearly, in-person offsites (hosted in locations around the U.S.).
Skills, Knowledge and Expertise
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5 in a senior leadership role (Director, Head, or VP level).
- Experience as a founder of a company and/or at a fast-growing startup.
- Deep understanding of social software.
- Strong technical background; ability to contribute meaningfully to architectural and systems-level discussions.
- Excellent people leadership skills with experience mentoring engineering leaders and shaping team culture.
- Effective communicator across technical and non-technical audiences.
- Experience overseeing enterprise-scale systems on modern cloud infrastructure (AWS).
Benefits
In addition to the new skills you'll pick up, here's what else you'll enjoy by working at Medium:
- Working with a fully distributed team: We’re fully remote and have teammates across the U.S. & France.
- Healthcare benefits covered at 100% for employees and 70% for dependents.
- Generous parental leave policy & child education stipend.
- Mental health support through Talkspace.
- Financial wellness support through Northstar.
- Stipends for wellness, co-working, professional development, wifi and a one-time home office bonus.
- Unlimited PTO and standard company holidays.
- A discounted Medium membership.
At Medium, we foster an inclusive, supportive, fun, and challenging team environment. We value having a team that is made up of a diverse set of backgrounds and respect the healthy expression of diverse opinions. We embrace experimentation and the examination of all kinds of ideas through reasoning and testing. Come join us as we continue to change the world of digital media.
Medium is an equal opportunity employer.
Read about our story here.
Salary Range: $300,000 - $400,000 USD
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